> And if they do, is it good design to install back-ends for (say) 23 such target architectures that you're never going to cross-compile for, in practice? Does that benefit the user?

   rustc --print target-list | wc -l
  287

I'm kinda surprised at how large that is, actually. But yeah, I don't mind if I have the capability to cross-compile to x86_64-wrs-vxworks that I'm never going to use.

I am not an expert on all of these details in clang specifically, but with rustc, we take advantage of llvm's target specifications, so you that you can even configure a backend that the compiler doesn't yet know about by simply giving it a json file with a description. https://doc.rust-lang.org/nightly/nightly-rustc/rustc_target...

While these built-in ones aren't defined as JSON, you can ask the compiler to print one for you:

     rustc +nightly -Z unstable-options --target=x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu --print target-spec-json

It's lengthy so instead of pasting here, I've put this in a gist: https://gist.github.com/steveklabnik/a25cdefda1aef25d7b40df3...

Anyway, it is true that gcc supports more targets than llvm, at least in theory. https://blog.yossarian.net/2021/02/28/Weird-architectures-we...