cross VS cargo

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.

Let GitHub build it for you? https://github.com/actions-rs/cargo

If you want to share binaries, it might be worthwhile to look into CI/CD building. GitHub Actions would be an easy choice. I haven't done cross-compilation for MacOS and Windows, just building static binaries with rust-musl-builder, but actions-rs/cargo seems worth a closer look and claims to support the cross project. That one would cover x86_64-unknown-linux-musl and x86_64-pc-windows-gnu, but no MacOS targets.

The cargo action comes with a built-in argument to use cross for you automatically as well.

It turns out that this is like the easiest thing in the world! The action-rs/cargo action I was already using had built-in support for cross. Now I even felt more stupid, but anyway..you just need to set the use-cross variable to true and you are done!