manylinux VS llvm-mingw

I use manylinux containers as the OS for compilation. It tries to ensure as much cross-os / libc / etc.. as much as possible for precompiled libraries. https://github.com/pypa/manylinux

Just to clarify for anyone who isn't aware, the "compiling issues", at least historically, have been that that Alpine uses musl, and PyPI's manylinux wheels are built against old glibc versions. So stuff like numpy that would trivially and quickly install from whl on glibc distros (like a bare-bones Ubuntu image) trigger compilations and the installation of build-only dependencies on Alpine.

That said, it looks like as of late-2021, at least some projects are offering musllinux wheels as well, per the discussion here: https://github.com/pypa/manylinux/issues/37 (not numpy, though: https://pypi.org/project/numpy/#files)

It's very hard. Incompatible glibc ABIs make this nigh impossible, there's a reason Steam installs a vcredistributable.dll for pretty much every game on Windows.

Look no further than the hoops you need jump through to distribute a Linux binary on PyPI [1]. Despite tons of engineering effort, and tons of hoop jumping from packagers, getting a non-trivial binary to run across all distros is still considered functionally impossible.

[1]: https://github.com/pypa/manylinux

As a user, if you build every python package from source, it's ok. But if you a maintainer of an OSS project and you need to publish binary packages for it, then you will hit the trouble. Binaries built on Ubuntu 20.04 can only support Ubuntu 20.04 and newer. So you'd better to choose an older Linux release to target broader users. Now most python packages choose CentOS 6 or 7. See https://github.com/pypa/manylinux/issues/1012 for more details. They need help!

I recently learned that Clang supports this kind of cross-compiling out of the box. https://mcilloni.ovh/2021/02/09/cxx-cross-clang/

The main difference is that Clang does not ship with headers/libraries for different platforms, as Zig appears to do. You need to give Clang a "sysroot" -- a path that has the headers/libraries for the platform you want to compile for.

If you create a bunch of sysroots for various architectures, you can do some pretty "easy" cross-compiling with just a single compiler binary. Docker can be a nice way of packaging up these sysroots (especially combined with Docker images like manylinux: https://github.com/pypa/manylinux). Gone are the days when you had to build a separate GCC cross-compiler for each platform you want to target.

Now you come and use manylinux to build. (https://github.com/pypa/manylinux) so you are based on the CentOS 7 toolchain (at best if you use manylinux2014) or Debian 9 toolchain (if you use manylinux_2_24).

I think the generally accepted way to do that would be a container image running a relatively old distribution. This is exactly what python packages do when they need to distribute binary packages on linux [0]. You are supposed to compile the package in a container (or VM) that runs CentOS 7 (or older if you want broader support), although now the baseline is moving gradually to Debian 9.

[0]: https://github.com/pypa/manylinux

> Doing Python with a C plugin, or just compiling a command line C/C++ isn't really systems programming.

I care about a minimal set of tools in order to compile C/C++ programs. thats offered by:

https://github.com/mstorsjo/llvm-mingw/releases

and also MSYS2, and even the Zig C compiler. all less than 200 MB. meanwhile Visual Studio installing about 10 GB worth. If Microsoft can offer a similar experience then I am interested.

Pick a community-supported Clang-based Mingw-w64 distribution.

> AFAIK there is no native GCC compiler for Windows

might want to check your facts before spouting nonsense. there is, and has been for many, many years. more than one in fact:

https://github.com/mstorsjo/llvm-mingw

https://packages.msys2.org/base/mingw-w64-gcc

MinGW is notoriously slow to link compared to MSVC, unless using llvm-mingw with the link=lld SCons option. If using MSVC, make sure to use 2022 or at least 2019 if possible – recent linkers tend to be faster than older versions.

GCC doesn't support windows/arm64, but you should be able to do it with LLVM. I've never gotten it to work myself, but should be able to supply a cross toolchain: https://github.com/mstorsjo/llvm-mingw

Visual Studio is a bloated mess, and has been for many years. Its at least 10 times larger than other options, such as MinGW-LLVM:

https://github.com/mstorsjo/llvm-mingw

Sadly Qt ships MinGW 8.1 which is positively ancient (released in 2018). If you're starting a new project (which you likely are if you are installing an IDE aha) there's no reason not to go for more recent compilers - msys2 has GCC12 (https://packages.msys2.org/package/mingw-w64-x86_64-gcc) and Clang 14 (https://packages.msys2.org/package/mingw-w64-x86_64-clang) which just work better overall, have much more complete C++20 support, have less bugs, better compile times (especially clang with the various PCH options that appeared in the last few versions), better static analysis, etc.

Personally I use https://github.com/mstorsjo/llvm-mingw's releases directly which does not require MSYS but that's because I recompile all my libraries with specific options - if the MSYS libs as they are built are good for you there's no reason not to use them.

you can grab it here: https://github.com/mstorsjo/llvm-mingw/releases/tag/20211002

Clang (and lld) do support native TLS, and mingw-w64 does have the things that are needed. I think binutils also might have what's needed too, but AFAIK the thing that's missing is support for it in GCC.

Actually, (upstream) Clang defaults to native TLS instead of emulated TLS. In MSYS2, Clang is overridden to use emulated TLS by deafult to interoperate better with GCC built code and libstdc++ though.

The toolchain I maintain, https://github.com/mstorsjo/llvm-mingw, defaults to native TLS throughout.