cross VS Cargo

Compare cross vs Cargo and see what are their differences.

cross

“Zero setup” cross compilation and “cross testing” of Rust crates (by cross-rs)
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cross Cargo
118 262
5,815 11,828
4.0% 2.5%
9.2 10.0
7 days ago 3 days ago
Rust Rust
Apache License 2.0 Apache License 2.0
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

cross

Posts with mentions or reviews of cross. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-07-11.
  • How to cross Compile on Debian for: Mac / FreeBSD / OpenBSD / Android ... ?
    3 projects | /r/rust | 11 Jul 2023
    I cross compile to Mac, bsd, windows, etc cross ... Works great for me with either docker or podman.
  • Transitioning to Rust as a company
    8 projects | /r/rust | 2 Jun 2023
    We are using https://github.com/cross-rs/cross.
  • A guide to cross-compilation in Rust
    2 projects | dev.to | 1 Jun 2023
    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.
  • Is there a definitive guide on cross-compiling with OpenSSL?
    2 projects | /r/rust | 26 May 2023
    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.
  • Docker ARMv7 Alpine Rust builder
    5 projects | /r/rust | 7 May 2023
    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.
  • Compiling Linux to Mac in CI/CD
    4 projects | /r/rust | 5 May 2023
    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.
  • How to you develop in containers?
    2 projects | /r/AskProgramming | 22 Apr 2023
    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.
  • What are some stuff that Rust isn't good at?
    14 projects | /r/rust | 16 Apr 2023
    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.
  • Trying to compile rust library on Windows
    4 projects | /r/rust | 1 Apr 2023
    Why not use cross? It manages all these dependencies in containers, no effort needed on your part.
  • How does cargo cross work?
    2 projects | /r/rust | 22 Mar 2023
    Following cross docs, I found this in the Wiki about using a remote container engine. The article implies some knowledge which I lack so my question is: what is the use case for that? Would I be able to use toolchain defined in the docker image using those features? bash CROSS_REMOTE=1 cross build --target x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu

Cargo

Posts with mentions or reviews of Cargo. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-02-06.
  • Scriptisto: "Shebang interpreter" that enables writing scripts in compiled langs
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 6 Feb 2024
    Nice hack! Would it have been possible back then to use cargo to pull in some dependencies?

    The clean solution of cargo script is here: https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/issues/12207

  • Making Rust binaries smaller by default
    8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 23 Jan 2024
    8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 23 Jan 2024
    Yes, I am sure this is going to be a part of Rust 1.77.0 and it will release on 21st March. I say that because of the tag in the PR (https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/pull/13257#event-11505613...).

    I'm no expert on Rust compiler development, but my understanding is that all code that is merged into master is available on nightly. If they're not behind a feature flag (this one isn't), they'll be available in a full release within 12 weeks of being merged. Larger features that need a lot more testing remain behind feature flags. Once they are merged into master, they remain on nightly until they're sufficiently tested. The multi-threaded frontend (https://blog.rust-lang.org/2023/11/09/parallel-rustc.html) is an example of such a feature. It'll remain nightly only for several months.

    Again, I'm not an expert. This is based on what I've observed of Rust development.

  • You can't do that because I hate you
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 28 Dec 2023
    "Beg", and "passive aggressive" from TFA, is an unnecessarily emotional interpretation of that sentence. It's perfectly neutral. When they imported `cargo-vendor` into cargo removed a feature that was not trivial to reimplement, so they asked for an issue to be opened so that they can see if people want it and so that someone can decide to implement it.

    That message *could* be updated to point to https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/issues/10310 instead of asking for new issues to be created or suggesting the old `cargo-vendor`. (The author of TFA already knows about that issue, since they commented on it before they published their article.)

    (You might say it would've been better to let cargo-vendor remain instead of importing it into cargo, but the reason that was done was to ensure it would continue to work with changes to cargo. Indeed that is why cargo-vendor does *not* work properly any more.)

    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 28 Dec 2023
    The author provides very surface-level criticism of two Rust tools, but they don't look into why those choices were made.

    With about five minutes of my time, I found out:

    wrap_comments was introduced in 2019 [0]. There are bugs in the implementation (it breaks Markdown tables), so the option hasn't been marked as stable. Progress on the issue has been spotty.

    --no-merge-sources is not trivial to re-implement [1]. The author has already explained why the flag no longer works -- Cargo integrated the command, but not all of the flags. This commit [2] explains why this functionality was removed in the first place.

    Rust is open source, so the author of this blog post could improve the state of the software they care about by championing these issues. The --no-merge-sources error message even encourages you to open an issue, presumably so that the authors of Cargo can gauge the importance of certain flags/features.

    You could even do something much simpler, like adding a comment to the related issues mentioning that you ran into these rough edges and that it made your life a little worse, or with a workaround that you found.

    Alternatively, you can continue to write about how much free software sucks.

    [0]: https://github.com/rust-lang/rustfmt/issues/3347

    [1]: https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/pull/10344

    [2]: https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/commit/3842d8e6f20067f716...

  • Cargo has never frustrated me like npm or pip has. Does Cargo ever get frustrating? Does anyone ever find themselves in dependency hell?
    13 projects | /r/rust | 6 Dec 2023
    And there are IMHO some rough edges around workspaced crates. E.g. https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/issues/3946
    13 projects | /r/rust | 6 Dec 2023
    Be careful about doing this globally on in a way that shares the target dir, you'll end up hitting a cargo bug that causes it to combine unexpected code in some cases, which can cause unsound behavior. https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/issues/12516
    13 projects | /r/rust | 6 Dec 2023
    For filesystem caches, see https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/issues/12633
    13 projects | /r/rust | 6 Dec 2023
    I wonder, is cargo gc solve the problem https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/pull/12634 ?
    13 projects | /r/rust | 6 Dec 2023
    Something else that will help is per user caching which several people are looking into. For dependencies you share between projects, they'll share the folder, saving on disk space.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing cross and Cargo you can also consider the following projects:

RustCMake - An example project showing usage of CMake with Rust

dockcross - Cross compiling toolchains in Docker images

Clippy - A bunch of lints to catch common mistakes and improve your Rust code. Book: https://doc.rust-lang.org/clippy/

RustScan - 🤖 The Modern Port Scanner 🤖

termux-adb-fastboot - android adb-fastboot tools for termux

opencv-rust - Rust bindings for OpenCV 3 & 4

overflower - A Rust compiler plugin and support library to annotate overflow behavior

crates.io - The Rust package registry

cargo-check

cargo-outdated - A cargo subcommand for displaying when Rust dependencies are out of date

cargo-dot - Generate graphs of a Cargo project's dependencies