CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rust
Lacrosse343
Lacrosse343

Reputation: 841

How can I determine which rust target to compile to by looking at a windows computer?

I am compiling a rust application that will be statically linked and then placed on an external server. What settings, config, or table should I look up to find the correct compile target? For most modern windows server and computers, x86_64-pc-windows-msvc should work just fine, but I wanted to know if there was a more concrete way of figuring this out.

Here the rustup docs mention windows installation and considerations, but not how to figure out the target.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 1272

Answers (1)

Locke
Locke

Reputation: 8980

Try going to the system you are building for and run echo %PROCESSOR_ARCHITECTURE%. This will give us information about the CPU architecture that can help us decide.

According to the win32 documentation, it will be a value of AMD64, IA64, ARM64, or x86. Conveniently these line up with the available windows rust targets. I can find all of the rust targets by running rustup target list and looking for ones with windows in the name. Here is that output on my machine:

$ rustup target list | grep windows
aarch64-pc-windows-msvc
i586-pc-windows-msvc
i686-pc-windows-gnu
i686-pc-windows-msvc
x86_64-pc-windows-gnu
x86_64-pc-windows-msvc

For the values of PROCESSOR_ARCHITECTURE, we can more or less approximate which is which by just googling them.

  • AMD64: This is just another name for x86_64 so we need to use either x86_64-pc-windows-msvc or x86_64-pc-windows-gnu.
  • IA64: ¯\(ツ)/¯ Rust is built on top of LLVM. IA64 has reached its end of life and not much hardware uses it so LLVM decided not to support this architecture. I think gcc probably does support it, but we're already out of luck when it comes to using Rust.
  • ARM64: This corresponds to the aarch64 architecture so we should use aarch64-pc-windows-msvc.
  • x86: This actually means we are running in 32bit mode so we need to choose either i686-pc-windows-msvc or i686-pc-windows-gnu.

As for i586-pc-windows-msvc, it refers to the older I5 Pentium architecture. It should be compatible with the newer i686 and x86_64 architectures, but may or may not be as performant. I would avoid it unless you are working with older hardware and need compatibility. I am also assuming it will not be compatible with windows 11 due to the new 64bit requirement.

As for the difference between msvc and gnu, you get to pick. I imagine msvc will be easier to work with, but I have not tried to use the gnu version.

Upvotes: 3

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