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What the hell is a target triple?
Cross-compiling is taking a computer program and compiling it for a machine that isn’t the one hosting the compilation. Although historically compilers would only compile for the host machine, this is considered an anachronism: all serious native compilers are now cross-compilers.
The main thing this identifies for a compiler is the executable format: COFF/PE for Windows, Mach-O for Apple’s operating systems, ELF for Linux and friends, and so on (this, however, is an oversimplification). AMD still makes the best x86 chips (I am writing this on a machine socketed with a Zen2 Threadripper), sure, but calling it amd64 is silly and also looks a lot like arm64, and I am honestly kinda annoyed at how much Go code I’ve seen with files named fast_arm64.s and fast_amd64.s. Darwin is a free and open source operating system based on Mach, a research kernel whose name survives in Mach-O, the object file format used by all Apple products.
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