crane VS cross

i would also recommend using crane or naersk since iirc rustPlaform.buildRustPackage can mangle some of these options (or maybe i just did something wrong lol)

Notably crane is doing what cargo-chef is doing for Nix.

I don't think it's very valid to compare the two. It is a little bit just to compare the experiences using them bit they aren't meant to solve the same set of issues. In fact, they are better together in my experience. I use nix to manage my terraform configurations with a lot of success. It reduces my boilerplate and helps me build abstractions on top of HCL.

If you ever decide to take a stab at nix again, consider looking at https://github.com/ipetkov/crane and using flakes. I've got it down to the point that I can get a new rust project set up with nix in about 30 seconds with linting, package building, and test running all in the checks

Take a look at Crane, though it is squarely aimed at non-beginners. If you want to submit whatever you're packaging to nixpkgs and not just for personal use, you can't use crane, though.

To get Rust incremental builds, did you consider using something such as crane https://github.com/ipetkov/crane ?

And regarding OCI images, i built nix2container (https://github.com/nlewo/nix2container) to speed up image build and push times.

This is the relevant part of my flake (which uses the quick-start template of crane):

I imagine/hope you've seen this, but over in Rust-land I do something similar using https://github.com/ipetkov/crane. I've been on the lookout for something precisely like this for a while. I don't know much about the newer versions of yarn but imagined such a thing was possible. I am looking forward to trying this out, especially if the above is eventually addressed.

If you haven't already, I recommend checking out crane for building extensible workflows using cargo and Nix (e.g. running clippy, cargo-audit, cargo-nextest, cargo-tarpaulin, etc.)

To compile a program with musl on a glibc system you can use cross-rs!

I cross compile to Mac, bsd, windows, etc cross ... Works great for me with either docker or podman.

If docker is available for you, https://github.com/cross-rs/cross is another and reliable way to solve this kind of problem. I do use it regularly.

We are using https://github.com/cross-rs/cross.

There is some built-in support in rustc for cross-compiling, but getting the build to actually work can be tricky due to the need for an appropriate linker. Instead, we’re going to use the Cross crate, which used to be maintained by the Rust Embedded Working Group Tools group.

I have used cross before to cross compile from Linux to other Linux. It has a section on it's wiki about this. Maybe that could be of help.

You can use cross to build your application and copy the artifacts into an alpine armv7 container. It would also build faster due to using cross compilation rather than QEMU.

Looks like cross is the easiest way to get something cross-compiled but its Mac support is blocked behind building your own build image. Even that repo says that it might be broken.

Bonus: if you’re working with Rust and doing a lot of cross platform stuff, check out cross. It runs QEMU in docker so you can run tests on a bunch of different emulated targets easily- literally a one line setup, it’s kind of magical.

It's also not as naturally cross-compilable as Go, though that's partly a side-effect of not accepting being a semi-closed ecosystem to achieve that and cross exists as a stop-gap while things like cargo-zigbuild explore less drastic options.