https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=83875
--- Comment #2 from Roland Schulz <roland at rschulz dot eu> --- The main problem is that it already gets resolved in the preprocessor stage. Thus if you have: __attribute__((target_clones("avx","default"))) void foo(){ #if __AVX__ ... #endif } , it doesn't work. __AVX__ is set depending on default even for the avx clone. Outside of target_clones it would have only a very minor advantage, that it would work directly because it would be 1/0 rather than 1/undef, and thus wouldn't require wrapping to be used in a constexpr context.