`*-apple-darwin`

Apple macOS targets.

Tier: 1

x86_64-apple-darwin: macOS on 64-bit x86.
aarch64-apple-darwin: macOS on ARM64 (M1-family or later Apple Silicon CPUs).

Requirements

OS version

The minimum supported version is macOS 10.12 Sierra on x86, and macOS 11.0 Big Sur on ARM64.

This version can be raised per-binary by changing the deployment target, which might yield more performance optimizations. rustc respects the common environment variables used by Xcode to do so, in this case MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET.

The current default deployment target for rustc can be retrieved with rustc --print=deployment-target.

Binary format

The default binary format is Mach-O, the executable format used on Apple's platforms.

Building

These targets are distributed through rustup, and otherwise require no special configuration.

Testing

There are no special requirements for testing and running this target.

x86 binaries can be run on Apple Silicon by using Rosetta.

Cross-compilation toolchains and C code

Cross-compilation of these targets are supported using Clang, but may require Xcode or the macOS SDK (MacOSX.sdk) to be available to compile C code and to link.

The Clang target is suffixed with -macosx. Clang's -darwin target refers to Darwin platforms in general (macOS/iOS/tvOS/watchOS/visionOS), and requires the -mmacosx-version-min=..., -miphoneos-version-min=... or similar flags to disambiguate.

The path to the SDK can be passed to rustc using the common SDKROOT environment variable.

The rustc book