cargo-xwin VS cargo-zigbuild

Today, I am excited to introduce a real game-changer - the [cargo-xwin](https://github.com/rust-cross/cargo-xwin) crate! After countless trials and errors, cargo-xwin was the only one that truly met my needs.

I couldn't tell you the licensing implications but the cargo-zigbuild developer also made cargo-xwin: https://github.com/rust-cross/cargo-xwin

I thought you could already cross compile to -windows-msvc targets from Linux using cargo-xwin?

I've personally used cargo-zigbuild and cargo-xwin to distribute a GUI app built with iced.

cargo-xwinbuild is a thin wrapper of xwin provides a Cargo subcommand xwinbuild to make cross compiling to Windows MSVC target just work.

So I thought I can try to make another Cargo subcommand which integrates xwin and automates the boring stuffs for you, here comes cargo-xwinbuild: https://github.com/messense/cargo-xwinbuild

https://github.com/rust-cross/cargo-zigbuild

I’m curious what the blockers are for rustc to cross-compile like zig does natively.

Perhaps you can try cargo-zigbuild, it uses zig-cc for cross-compilation instead of creating a container, so it should be much more lightweight on MacOS, without all the cost of virtualization and file sharing.

I have tried, however I haven't been able to get it to work reliably (e.g. building on windows + linux on WSL works, Mac is a lot more involved; tried building for windows + linux on Mac and I couldn't get it to work at all); I've had some luck using zigbuild but that too doesn't seem to work for Mac.

Zig also takes this approach, and even exposes its C compiler (which if I recall correctly is basically Clang plus diverse sysroots and other customisation out of the box) as a separate `zig cc`.

I do a lot of work in Rust, and cross-compilation can be a pain when you have a lot of C dependencies. Fortunately https://github.com/messense/cargo-zigbuild exists. It sounds crazy, but using Zig's inbuilt C compiler to help build my Rust projects has been the smoothest option I've found.

I can't help but wonder if it would be worth it for Rust to follow D and Zig by shipping its own inbuilt C compiler, even if they still want to also support external C toolchains. It should be roughly the same effort as it was for Zig, given that they both use LLVM.

Wait until you start using cargo zig-build. Suddenly it becomes way better than Go's cross compiler because you can seamlessly cross-compile rust AND C (thanks to Zig compiler of course). https://github.com/messense/cargo-zigbuild