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I'm a bit surprised nobody mentions the `--platform` argument that docker accepts to emulate a different architecture per container. It's a very smooth experience if you're reliant on 3rd party images.

Available through compose as well.

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I worked with cross-compiling containers. The compiling times were... bad. Our x86 build took like, two minutes (this was a very small and lean C++ application). The arm32v7 ones took upwards of 30 minutes.

Same experience. Beefy machine, takes 45 minutes to compile cmake using a ppc64le container on an x86_64 host.

Works the other way around as well: Compile platform independent code (such as Java) on --platform=$BUILDPLATFORM in a build stage and then copy into containers that are --platform=$TARGETPLATFORM. That way your build only runs once, natively, but you can produce the correct runtime containers for each architecture rather quickly.

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