Renaming Cargo "target"

[djc]

@epage

The main concerns we had in the Cargo team when we discussed this were

• An "artifact" can actually have multiple artifacts, one per crate-type.
  • Not as many users are likely to come in contact with this level of ambiguity as the current "target" ambiguity
• Not all "artifacts" have artifacts (ie copied out of intermediate locations into final locations, e.g. tests)
  • Likely close enough for now and we can always evolve things to allow more artifacts to be produced
  • You could twist things around to say that the test results are the artifact.

So you're saying there are actually three different concepts here, right?

1. A "platform" target: a triple you can compile for (--target)
2. An "artifact" target: the output of a build (/target)
3. A "unit" target: a compilation unit (lib, bins, examples, etc; --all-targets)

I seem to remember that Cargo also uses the "unit" wording in some of its internals. Would it maybe make sense to rename (3) to unit while renaming (2) to artifact? I guess at the rustc level there might be overlap with codegen units, but --all-units seems like a potentially better alternative then --all-artifacts especially when used with cargo check (which doesn't actually produce artifacts).

[epage]

Maybe its my bias for how Cargo already uses "unit" but its ingrained in me that "unit" is the same as "node" or "crate" which can represent anything in the build graph, not just the root (or leaves, depending on your perspective).