cargo-zigbuild VS msvc-wine-rust

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

AFAIK, there are no blockers really, it's just that Rust does not have its own linker, it delegates linkage to the system linker depending on the target. <https://rust-lang.github.io/rustup/cross-compilation.html?hi...>

You can specify your own linker if you want, mold is a very popular one, and cargo-zigbuild does the same behind the scenes with zig cc as the linker.

I did something similar a couple of months ago (or a year ago? I don't remember exactly). I managed to cross-compile to windows-msvc on Linux using Wine, there's a project that provides the scripts to make this easier, including the linker wrapper: <https://github.com/est31/msvc-wine-rust>. It was just for fun because Rust can already target windows-gnu and it'll use mingw64 linker.

Rust's approach to things is normally to provide the basic foundation and let the community build on top of it. I personally like this approach, but it also has this downside of people not knowing they may need an external/community built tool to accomplish what they want.

That's pretty neat! Generally though, I advise staying away from the official installer, it puts a lot of stuff onto the hard disk, not sure what, but suddenly a lot of free space is gone. If you download the components manually and install them manually, you reach a way smaller footprint. I've done that thing 5 years ago but not maintained it since as I don't need it any more, but: https://github.com/est31/msvc-wine-rust

See also: https://github.com/est31/msvc-wine-rust