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Cross-compiling binaries for Windows is easier than building natively

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Re: Cross-compiling binaries for Windows is easier than building natively

#21

Post by nshm »

For me SDK sizes are showstopper. Mingw packages are probably 100-200 Mb total. To build anything native one has to install Windows (20+Gb in modern version and then Visual Studio 40+Gb). Not so easy to fit it all on an SSD drive.

Xcode also have this problem now. 8Gb for Xcode 7 is manageable. But why 70Gb for Xcode 11?

Re: Cross-compiling binaries for Windows is easier than building natively

#22

Post by ratww »

Animats wrote: post #14

It is. I generate the Windows executables for a program by cross-compiling Rust on Linux. Then test with Wine. The Rust crates are cross-platform enough that I don't have to special case platforms. This is easier than having a Windows machine. The only current headache is that there's no pure Rust bundler, to make ".msi" or ".msix" installer files. If you dump the legacy OS stuff, it gets easier.

Doesn't cargo-bundle do that? I haven't tried to use it to generate .msi files, only for iOS/macOS, but it has the feature!

Re: Cross-compiling binaries for Windows is easier than building natively

#23

Post by recursive »

nshm wrote: post #21

For me SDK sizes are showstopper. Mingw packages are probably 100-200 Mb total. To build anything native one has to install Windows (20+Gb in modern version and then Visual Studio 40+Gb). Not so easy to fit it all on an SSD drive. Xcode also have this problem now. 8Gb for Xcode 7 is manageable. But why 70Gb for Xcode 11?

There are very few things that actually require Visual Studio just to build.

Re: Cross-compiling binaries for Windows is easier than building natively

#24

Post by steeleduncan »

recursive wrote: post #23
nshm wrote: post #21

For me SDK sizes are showstopper. Mingw packages are probably 100-200 Mb total. To build anything native one has to install Windows (20+Gb in modern version and then Visual Studio 40+Gb). Not so easy to fit it all on an SSD drive. Xcode also have this problem now. 8Gb for Xcode 7 is manageable. But why 70Gb for Xcode 11?

There are very few things that actually require Visual Studio just to build.

Interesting, how can I install just the cmake + msvc to do command line builds with windows? I'm also installing wsl2 + mingw because it is so much lighter for compilation than many, many gigabytes of vis studio.

Re: Cross-compiling binaries for Windows is easier than building natively

#25

Post by xboxnolifes »

nshm wrote: post #21

For me SDK sizes are showstopper. Mingw packages are probably 100-200 Mb total. To build anything native one has to install Windows (20+Gb in modern version and then Visual Studio 40+Gb). Not so easy to fit it all on an SSD drive. Xcode also have this problem now. 8Gb for Xcode 7 is manageable. But why 70Gb for Xcode 11?

> To build anything native one has to install Windows (20+Gb in modern version and then Visual Studio 40+Gb). Not so easy to fit it all on an SSD drive.

Maybe a decade ago, but SSDs are so much cheaper per GB nowadays. Around $0.11/GB. Pretty sure that's cheaper than the first 1TB HDD I've owned.

Re: Cross-compiling binaries for Windows is easier than building natively

#26

Post by fragmede »

bilekas wrote: post #15
fortran77 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly it. Windows developers know NTFS has Symbolic Links https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/creati...

Maybe I missed something on this discussion but symlinks and NTFS are not really related.. They have them yes, how they're handled is different.

How are they not related? If NTFS didn't have symlinks we wouldn't be having this discussion. Critically, the modern standard for removable drives, exFAT does not support symlinks, so you can't count on Windows' support for symlinks if the user is git cloning on a drive that's using exFAT.

Re: Cross-compiling binaries for Windows is easier than building natively

#27

Post by munchler »

jrm4 wrote: post #5

Microsoft's days as a 'primary' desktop operating system are numbered. The OP doesn't seem to understand this, but even Microsoft itself does, which is why most of its major moves the past few years haven't been improving its own desktop, but positioning itself to control "open source" the best it can. More people within the MS ecosystem should understand this.

One can argue that desktops are no longer the primary computing environment, but I don't think there's any evidence that Windows is about to displaced within the desktop world.

What are you proposing will become the primary desktop OS? Some Linux flavor of the month? MacOS? Neither seems at all likely in the foreseeable future.

Re: Cross-compiling binaries for Windows is easier than building natively

#28

Post by swarnie »

nshm wrote: post #21

For me SDK sizes are showstopper. Mingw packages are probably 100-200 Mb total. To build anything native one has to install Windows (20+Gb in modern version and then Visual Studio 40+Gb). Not so easy to fit it all on an SSD drive. Xcode also have this problem now. 8Gb for Xcode 7 is manageable. But why 70Gb for Xcode 11?

A 1tb M.2 drive is what... £70?

If that's out of reach im not sure how you're powering your dev machine.

Re: Cross-compiling binaries for Windows is easier than building natively

#29

Post by pjmlp »

nshm wrote: post #21

For me SDK sizes are showstopper. Mingw packages are probably 100-200 Mb total. To build anything native one has to install Windows (20+Gb in modern version and then Visual Studio 40+Gb). Not so easy to fit it all on an SSD drive. Xcode also have this problem now. 8Gb for Xcode 7 is manageable. But why 70Gb for Xcode 11?

Mingw doesn't support anything other than basic UNIX on top of Win32, naturally they take so little.
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