mxe VS zig

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 is an issue proposing this approach: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/4284

https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/224

e.g.:

> > When debugging/prototyping, it's useful to comment out a line without having to refactor, e.g.

When writing code in a scripting language, sometimes you need that extra bit of performance (or maybe an async feature from Zig).

NodeJS is by no means a slow runtime, it wouldn’t be so popular if it was. But compared to Bun, it’s slow. Bun was built from the ground up with speed in mind, using both JavascriptCore and Zig. The Bun team spent an enormous amount of time and energy trying to make Bun fast, including lots of profiling, benchmarking, and optimizations.

ntdll.dll!RtlUserThreadStart()

There are valid reasons to use APIs from NTDLL. Where I disagree with zig#1840 is the idea that it is always better to use NTDLL versions of API. Every other software ecosystem uses the standard Win32 APIs and diverging from that without a good reason seems like a good way to have unexpected behavior. One concrete example is most users and programmers expect Windows to redirect some file system paths when running on WOW64. But this is implemented in Kernel32, not ntdll.

https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/11894

Zig also has an IRC channel on libera (#zig) that is moderated by Andrew Kelley.[1]

[1] https://github.com/ziglang/zig/wiki/Community