cargo-zigbuild

I'm not rooting for Zig [1] but I think there are some misses here, e.g.: > Cross-compilation looks like a standout feature in Zig, although C developers have been doing the same thing for decades. ... You can target an embedded ARM board or a RISC-V chip with one flag: Disagree: Zig's cross-compilation support is better than anything else. For one, installing a toolchain for a different OS/arch combo is not necessarily so easy with C. For another, with Zig you can target an arbitrary Linux glibc version with a commandline argument. Without Zig's toolchain, [2] the best I've seen is to run within a Docker container with that glibc version installed. [1] almost entirely because I think all new languages should have memory safety (via GC or borrow checking). [2] I see people linking Rust programs with Zig's toolchain for this reason: https:

You should check out cargo-zigbuild which makes use of zig for cross compiling rust projects. https://github.com/rust-cross/cargo-zigbuild

I use this which seems to work well for my projects. Particularly their docker image. https://github.com/rust-cross/cargo-zigbuild

Interestingly you can use zig within your Rust build to more easily cross-compile: https://github.com/rust-cross/cargo-zigbuild I’m curious what the blockers are for rustc to cross-compile like zig does natively.

Zig also takes this approach, and even exposes its C compiler (which if I recall correctly is basically Clang plus diverse sysroots and other customisation out of the box) as a separate `zig cc`. I do a lot of work in Rust, and cross-compilation can be a pain when you have a lot of C dependencies. Fortunately https://github.com/messense/cargo-zigbuild exists. It sounds crazy, but using Zig's inbuilt C compiler to help build my Rust projects has been the smoothest option I've found. I can't help but wonder if it would be worth it for Rust to follow D and Zig by shipping its own inbuilt C compiler, even if they still want to also support external C toolchains. It should be roughly the same effort as it was for Zig, given that they both use LLVM.

Have you tried cargo zigbuild? You can target specific GLIBC versions. https://github.com/messense/cargo-zigbuild