Codegen on mac vs linux

compiler
1 
stable-x86_64-apple-darwin (default)
rustc 1.52.1 (9bc8c42bb 2021-05-09)

Hey there folks. I would like to draw attention of those above my pay grade, who can shed some light on something i can't understand as of now. I was doing some benchmarks on different crates and i noticed that a crate https://crates.io/crates/matchit when compiled for stable-x86_64-apple-darwin does not have any SIMD instructions but when compiled for x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu it does have SIMD instructions and is much faster as a result.

2

That's surprising, because at the compiler level, macOS should have the advantage in target features. The x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu target is very generic with only fxsr, sse, and sse2, while x86_64-apple-darwin uses a "core2" base CPU adding cmpxchg16b, sse3, and ssse3.

Maybe something in the crate itself (or its dependencies) is using explicit SIMD gated for Linux only?

3

The same results can be observed when I use my Linux machine as well. The crate is using SIMD UTF-8 validation. However, I have removed it and it's not using any other crates. There are still SIMD instructions which are not present on Mac. Several people, including me, the author of the crate and others from the Rust discord server have tried to understand what's happening here but couldn't.

4

Do you have .cargo/config in the project directory or any parent directory? It could be enabling target CPU features.

5

No. Everything is up on the repo. There is no config.

6

I believe the default target on darwin is to target very general target environments for maximum compatibility:

% rustc +nightly -Z unstable-options --print target-spec-json | jq '."llvm-target"'
"x86_64-apple-macosx10.7.0"

See this thread for information about how you can fix this for your builds, and discussion about changing the default.

2 Likes
7

That solved the mystery. Thank you! I added a .cargo/config.toml

[target.x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu]
rustflags = ["-Ctarget-cpu=native"]

[target.x86_64-apple-darwin]
rustflags = ["-Ctarget-cpu=native"]
8

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