cargo-zigbuild VS ci

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

APPVEYOR: Appveyor is an open source project builder. It works good for GITHUB repositories. The user can login to the actual VM. For more info: https://www.appveyor.com/

appveyor.com — CD service for Windows, free for Open Source

AppVeyor (GitLab/Gitea)

If you don't have an access to Mac or PC you can bundle your app for all three platforms with AppVeyor - Continuous Integration service for Windows, Linux and macOS. In short, Continuous Integration (CI) is an automated process of building, testing and deploying (Continuous Delivery - CD) application on every push to a repository.

I then do my building on a CI/CD service that offers Windows VMs free to open-source projects, with Appveyor being the first I'm aware of to start doing so.

Appveyor does as well. https://www.appveyor.com/

We were also using AppVeyor for CI during the early periods of the library and I managed to add a step at the end of the CI pipeline to do a NuGet publish, when a tag was created in GitHub. This completely removed any human error or any inadvertent omissions due to lack of time etc. This worked well for us other than the occasional NuGet publish failures due to expired API key. We had to jump into AppVeyor dashboard to see what was going on and fix things. Eventually, we migrated all the CI builds to use GitHub actions so that we can lookup things all in one-place without logging into different systems. This is a huge convenience and time saver for us. We settled on doing a manual GitHub action trigger (user invoked) especially for publishing NuGet packages rather than keep it automated so that we can inspect and keep an eye on the NuGet publish as it happens after we tag and add a release in GitHub.

I thing yes. Personally i'm use powershell scripts to deploy things via appveyor and to run something locally via task scheduler.

Can't cross-build to the MSVC or macOS targets without a license to use the Microsoft or Apple C/C++ developer tools for the final linkage against the platform libraries... and I believe even the free ones require you to have a valid license for Windows or own a Macintosh. (This can be worked around by building your release artifacts on a free-for-open-source CI/CD service like Appveyor or using the MinGW target for Windows if you don't need to link to MSVC-built libraries.)

Script source: https://github.com/appveyor/ci/blob/master/scripts/enterprise/grant_logon_as_service.ps1