mxe VS xwin

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.

There's tooling that mostly avoids this. https://github.com/Jake-Shadle/xwin

This is a utility that fixes a lot of the cross-compiling issues for windows by giving you a portable, unfucked naming, and not-massive SDK. It's the same SDK you get when you install MSVC but it's only a few hundred megs and the names are consistent even with all of Windows' fucked up tooling.

The only caveat is you need to provide your own compiler, in this case clang is often the best option.

cargo-xwinbuild is a thin wrapper of xwin provides a Cargo subcommand xwinbuild to make cross compiling to Windows MSVC target just work.

This situation bugs me a lot, and I remembered a blog post about the xwin which makes cross compiling Windows binaries from Linux quite easy, but it requires a lot of manual setup. While using Docker containers make it easier, it's also slower.

I will do you one better. When I do windows development, I work within WSL and use the cross-compiler toolchain to generate windows binaries. I have found "Xwin" to be very useful for this: https://github.com/Jake-Shadle/xwin

I've just pushed a 0.1.1 release that fixes this issue, unsure why the windows crate decided to use screaming case in their link names but I'm sure they're not the only ones.