Has anyone managed to cross-compile from Windows or Linux to MacOS?

[phatchman]

I've had a few different attempts at this, but never got it to work.

I have a sysroot set up under Darling with the MacOS SDK installed within it, but zig can never seem to find any of the frameworks to link. I can cross compile command line apps just fine.

[david-vanderson]

I haven't tried this sorry. I've only cross-compiled from x86_64-linux to aarch64-linux.

[phatchman]

I'm fairly sure it is a zig issue, rather than a build dvui issue. I'll try adding some explicit system library paths to the build script and see if that helps.

[phatchman]

From https://github.com/ikskuh/SDL.zig

MacOS
Right now, cross-compiling for MacOS isn't possible. On a Mac, install SDL2 via brew

So it seems it might not be easy/possible at least for SDL2? Will check out if Mach allows this at some point.

ikskuh/SDL.zig#8 appears to have a potential solution. Will take a closer look to see if I can integrate it

[phatchman]

I've made some small progress on this with getting a linux / SDL2 app cross-compiled from windows.

What I've found is that

1. Each underlying build.zig file needs to support cross-compilation. It's not possible to "patch" the required include and lib directories from a parent build.zig file. (Or at least I haven't found a way to do it)
2. It's better to package all the arch-specific build dependencies in their own dependency, instead of using sysroot.
   • For example, Windows doesn't follow symlinks when passing a sysroot.
   • Zig doesn't seems to handle paths nicely when sysroot is on another drive letter. It appears to simply pre-pend sysroot to the cwd requiring a lot of relative path shenanigans. (Pretty sure this is a bug in the zig compiler)

I think in the short-term this isn't going to be feasible. If I work out a less-hacky way to implement this, I'll try to get a patch upstreamed to support cross-compilation for SDL2.

Edit: see https://github.com/castholm/SDL which claims to be able to croos-compile sdl3 for macos, but by using sysroot.