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Comment by gpanders | Hacker News Reader

Do you have experience cross compiling? If so, you’re likely familiar with the headache: getting the right tool chains, sysroots, compiler flags, libraries, etc. There are entire businesses and open source tools whose raison d'être is providing these tool chains and making the process simpler.

With Zig, that all goes away. It’s as simple as saying `zig build -Dtarget=aarch64-linux-gnu` or `zig build -Dtarget=riscv32-freestanding-none` and it just works. It’s pretty incredible.

Zig has set the bar for how cross compilation should be done and all other languages should be measured against it. Rust is close but is still a headache. The only other language that compares at the moment (IMO) is Go.

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Huh. From what you said and then a quick peek at the docs Zig does seem great in that regard, but in my own experience I’ve definitely found Rust to be equally competent.

What about Zig would you say makes it better? Rust has `cargo build --target <triple>`

Cross compiling for the language itself is half of it, albeit a half Rust does decently well too, but Zig will also cross compile C/C++ for you just as easily. The latter part combined with Zig's focus on making it as 0 effort as possible to do either action is what results in it being talked about so much.

Admittedly I don’t have as much experience cross compiling with Rust, but my experience has not been so smooth. You need to install each target toolchain manually with rustup, and then some tool chains require different versions of Rust (e.g. the ESP32 RISC-V toolchain requires nightly). Another time I tried cross compiling on x86 Linux targeting Linux on ARM64, and I kept getting linking errors (or it couldn’t find an acceptable linker).

I certainly agree that Rust is much better than C/C++, but it’s not quite at Zig level, at least in my (limited) experience.

From what I've heard, for Rust the difficulty comes in when you're using a Rust wrapper of a C/C++ library and you need to crosscompile both into the binary.

I use Zig and cargo-zigbuild to cross-compile my Rust projects. It simply works, without Docker, if I want it to use older GLIBC symbols for an embedded Linux target running an ancient kernel/glibc version, or if I want to cross-compile to an M1 Mac from Linux. Of course, you still need to provide all the pkg-config/libraries/headers for the target platform, but that’s simple enough.

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