xwin VS osxcross

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.

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