Hacker News Reader

Comment by unnouinceput | Hacker News Reader

Quote: "Cross-building is possible but requires extra steps, so just use the platform you're running on to avoid errors"

Meanwhile in Delphi you just select the target OS from the list of supported OS'es and just "build and deploy". Why is that every single other IDE that I've tested it's an adventure to create cross-building, to the point where you need to give blood from your fingers to the God of that OS before you finally make a good build.

View on HN

Delphi does not have the problem that it's illegal to redistribute e.g. macOS headers on a non-mac machine according to Xcode license. Likewise, until very recently the MSVC C++ standard library was under a proprietary license which you could not redistribute, only use in your own software. It's a social issue, not a technical one.

That cross-compiling is still so thorny in 2021 is in my opinion a big failure of software engineering.

The creator of Zig is maintaining a very accessible and immediate cross compilation infrastructure for Zig and C alike (zig cc). It's a secondary thing to him, but I practically use it very often since it just works, in contrast to the other stuff. Unfortunately even zig cc has often issues with less tested platforms like 32 bit ARM

Mainly because C/C++ libraries/build environments/compilers just don't sit still and continue to evolve/devolve/diverge.

If you have a single language with a single compiler, presumably with a smaller user base, chances are that is less of a problem.

Which is quite fun to read for those of us that remember Kylix.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com