muslrust VS cross

That's isn't true, one can make fully independent static binary in rust

The winning combo that I found works great is a multistage build, using clux/muslrust to build the dependencies + the binary itself, then using a scratch image as the final stage. Depending on the complexity, the statically linked images I use range from ~9MB to ~22MB. The 9MB image was ported from an existing container that was dynamically linked, and if I remember right, the image was in the ~70-80MB range using debian:buster-slim as the final stage.

muslrust: seems to be active last commit on Oct 2, 2021. But what is the difference compared to the one above?

Oh, I remember that I use https://github.com/clux/muslrust and is there what the bug is triggered. Weirdly, running it locally not show it.

After a lot of searching I came across a Docker image which provides a clean environment for building Rust linked against musl libc. It includes curl, pq, sqlite3, and zlib, but the main one I needed was OpenSSL. This container image solved my problem and I can run using Docker locally as well as in the GitHub Action build workflow.

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.