Demoting i686-PC-windows-gnu to Tier 2

In Rust 1.88.0, the Tier 1 target i686-pc-windows-gnu will be demoted to Tier 2. As a Tier 2 Target, builds will continue to be distributed for both the standard library and the compiler. Background Rust has supported Windows for a long time, with two different flavors of Windows targets: MSVC-based and GNU-based. MSVC-based targets (for example the most popular Windows target x86_64-pc-windows-msvc ) use Microsoft’s native linker and libraries, while GNU-based targets (like i686-pc-windows-gnu ) are built entirely from free software components like gcc , ld , and mingw-w64. The major reason to use a GNU-based toolchain instead of the native MSVC-based one is cross-compilation and licensing. link.exe only runs on Windows (barring Wine hacks) and requires a license for commercial usage. x86_64-pc-windows-gnu and i686-pc-windows-gnu are currently both Tier 1 with host tools. The Target Tier Policy contains more details on what this entails, but the most important part is that tests f ... Read full article.