mxe VS osxcross

Cross compiler 64bit minGW along with MXE environment

I used to use MXE [1] to compile fully static Windows binaries on Linux VMs hosted with Travis. It needed to crane in everything though, so it was a source of bottlenecks from time to time. I was also uncertain about the provenance of a lot of the dependencies in that toolchain. So when Travis died I took the opportunity to move Windows builds back to gnu with msys2, all over GH Actions. These are actually comparatively snappy and I’m reasonably satisfied with it.

[1] https://mxe.cc/

MXE readily supports GCC 12 as a plugin (just a configuration line): https://github.com/mxe/mxe/tree/master/plugins/gcc12

Also, if you don't have any other significant dependencies, getting the development tools on Windows is not that hard with the Qt installer. Alternatively, there is MXE.

MXE (https://mxe.cc/) is a great cross compiler environment (on linux) that uses mingw.

You can install Docker to build on any Linux distro, and if one of those is Ubuntu then you can use https://github.com/mxe/mxe to further build for Windows. Or VirtualBox + Ubuntu + MXE.

If you actually have MacOS device and can install Xcode and so on then you can proceed here and read the instructions.

Have you considered using a dockerized osxcross cross compiler toolchain in your CI? Granted it is a bit clunky to setup...

Technically it's possible, but possibly not legal:

https://github.com/tpoechtrager/osxcross

> Please ensure you have read and understood the Xcode license terms before continuing.

According to the EULA you may only use the SDK on Apple-branded computers. But you can use Linux to cross compile to Apple.

is there a way to cross compile without vms? something similar to https://github.com/tpoechtrager/osxcross?

If you figure out how to get SDL working, one possibility is to develop on Linux, then use mingw-w64 to cross compile from Linux to windows, then use osxcross to cross-compile from Windows to OSX.

Thank you osxcross for creating the path forward

This is actually a solved problem, using osxcross[0]. The experience is honestly very smooth, and we don't require any apple proprietary binaries. The only thing apple-proprietary is their SDK (containing the header files for compiling, and tbd files for linking), which can be downloaded from apple's website (at least if you have a developer account), or from various GitHub projects archiving them.

[0]: https://github.com/tpoechtrager/osxcross