macOS: Always pass SDK root when linking with cc, and pass it via SDKROOT env var

[madsmtm]

About trampoline binaries

The developer binaries at /usr/bin/* are actually just trampolines (similar in spirit to the Rust binaries in ~/.cargo/bin) which invoke xcrun to get the current developer directory, and then launch the actual binary under /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Toolchains/XcodeDefault.xctoolchain/usr/bin/*.

The actual binary is then launched with the following environment variables set (but none of them are set if SDKROOT is set explicitly):

• SDKROOT=/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/MacOSX.platform/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX.sdk
• LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib (appended)
• CPATH=/usr/local/include (appended)
• MANPATH=/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/MacOSX.platform/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX.sdk/usr/share/man:/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/MacOSX.platform/usr/share/man:/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/usr/share/man:/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Toolchains/XcodeDefault.xctoolchain/usr/share/man: (prepended)

This allows the user to type e.g. cc --version in their terminal on macOS, and have it automatically pick up a suitable Clang binary from either an installed Xcode.app or the Xcode Command Line Tools (it acts roughly as-if you typed xcrun cc --version).

Always setting SDK root

So, the logic for finding the macOS SDK root is usually handled by the /usr/bin/cc trampoline, which is why we currently just remove the SDKROOT env var when set for the wrong platform, and don't do anything else.

This doesn't work when building inside Xcode though, since Xcode prepends /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Toolchains/XcodeDefault.xctoolchain/usr/bin to PATH, which means we end up calling the actual Clang binary, and end up without an SDK root specified at all.

Instead, we now always set the SDK root, even when linking with cc on macOS. This fixes #80817, fixes #96943, and generally makes linking with cc and ld closer in behaviour (ld doesn't understand SDKROOT, so it's not affected by xcrun).

Setting SDKROOT instead of -isysroot

The exact reasoning why we do not always pass the SDK root with -isysroot to cc when linking on macOS eludes me (the git history dead ends in #100286), but I suspect it's because we want to support ccs which do not support this option.
To make sure that such use-cases continue to work, we pass the SDK root via the SDKROOT environment variable. This way, compiler drivers that support setting the SDK root (such as Clang and GCC) can use it, while compiler drivers that don't (presumably because they figure out the SDK root in some other way) can just ignore it.

One danger here would be if there's some compiler driver out there which works with the -isysroot flag, but not with the SDKROOT environment variable. I am not aware of any?

Note also that this overrides the behaviour discussed above (/usr/bin/cc sets some extra environment variables), I will argue that is fine:

• MANPATH and CPATH is useless when linking
• /usr/local/lib is empty on a default system at least since macOS 10.14, but might be filled by extra libraries installed by the user, but I'd argue that if we want it to be part of the library search path, we should set it explicitly so that it's also set when linking with ld directly.

Alternatives

• Invoke /usr/bin/cc instead of cc.
  • This breaks many other use-cases though where overriding cc in the PATH is desired.
• Look up which cc, and do special logic if in Xcode toolchain.
  • Seems brittle, and besides, it's not the cc in the Xcode toolchain that's wrong, it's the /usr/bin/cc behaviour that is a bit too magical.
• Invoke xcrun --sdk macosx cc.
  • This completely ignores SDKROOT, so we'd still have to parse that first to figure out if it's suitable or not, but would probably be workable.
• Maybe somehow configure the linker with extra flags such that it'll be able to link regardless of linking for macOS or e.g. iOS? Though I doubt this is possible.

Meta

Part of #129432.

CC @BlackHoleFox @thomcc

Builds upon #131433, see the last commit for the actual change.
@rustbot blocked
@rustbot label relnotes

[rustbot]

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[rustbot]

These commits modify compiler targets.
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[nnethercote]

This looks reasonable, but I don't really have the first idea about any of this stuff and that means I'm not a great reviewer for it. @thomcc, are you able to take a look? I can rubber-stamp it if you are happy.

One question: there are no tests in this PR or in #131433. Should there be?

[rustbot]

This PR modifies tests/run-make/. If this PR is trying to port a Makefile
run-make test to use rmake.rs, please update the
run-make port tracking issue
so we can track our progress. You can either modify the tracking issue
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cc @jieyouxu

[madsmtm]

One question: there are no tests in this PR or in #131433. Should there be?

There are a few unit tests under compiler/rustc_codegen_ssa/src/back/apple/tests.rs, but your point stands, there are no integration tests for this.

The main reason for that is that this is really hard to write a robust test for, since this is so heavily environment specific - but I guess a test that adds the Xcode paths to PATH as a regression test for #80817 would be doable, I've done that and rebased, thanks for the nudge to do it ;).

[rustbot]

Some changes occurred in src/doc/rustc/src/platform-support

cc @Noratrieb

[thomcc]

I approve of the macOS specific parts of this. I'm not a compiler reviewer so I haven't done any review for style/etc. That said that part does look fine to me. It's a great PR overall. Great PR description too, clarified some things I had always wondered about.

[nnethercote]

Thanks, @thomcc. Once #131433 is merged I'm happy for this to merge.

@bors delegate=madsmtm

[bors]

✌️ @madsmtm, you can now approve this pull request!

If @nnethercote told you to "r=me" after making some further change, please make that change, then do @bors r=@nnethercote

[bors]

☔ The latest upstream changes (presumably #132497) made this pull request unmergeable. Please resolve the merge conflicts.