`*-apple-tvos`

Apple tvOS targets.

Tier: 3

aarch64-apple-tvos: Apple tvOS on ARM64.
aarch64-apple-tvos-sim: Apple tvOS Simulator on ARM64.
x86_64-apple-tvos: Apple tvOS Simulator on x86_64.

Requirements

These targets are cross-compiled, and require the corresponding tvOS SDK (AppleTVOS.sdk or AppleTVSimulator.sdk), as provided by Xcode. To build the ARM64 targets, Xcode 12 or higher is required.

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

OS version

The minimum supported version is tvOS 10.0, although the actual minimum version you can target may be newer than this, for example due to the versions of Xcode and your SDKs.

The version can be raised per-binary by changing the deployment target. rustc respects the common environment variables used by Xcode to do so, in this case TVOS_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET.

Incompletely supported library functionality

The targets support most of the standard library including the allocator to the best of my knowledge, however they are very new, not yet well-tested, and it is possible that there are various bugs.

The following APIs are currently known to have missing or incomplete support:

std::process::Command's API will return an error if it is configured in a manner which cannot be performed using posix_spawn -- this is because the more flexible fork/exec-based approach is prohibited on these platforms in favor of posix_spawn{,p} (which still probably will get you rejected from app stores, so is likely sideloading-only). A concrete set of cases where this will occur is difficult to enumerate (and would quickly become stale), but in some cases it may be worked around by tweaking the manner in which Command is invoked.

Building the target

The targets can be built by enabling them for a rustc build in config.toml, by adding, for example:

[build]
build-stage = 1
target = ["aarch64-apple-tvos", "aarch64-apple-tvos-sim"]

Using the unstable -Zbuild-std with a nightly Cargo may also work.

Building Rust programs

Rust programs can be built for these targets by specifying --target, if rustc has been built with support for them. For example:

$ rustc --target aarch64-apple-tvos your-code.rs

There is no support for running the Rust or standard library testsuite at the moment. Testing has mostly been done manually with builds of static libraries embedded into applications called from Xcode or a simulator.

It hopefully will be possible to improve this in the future.

The rustc book