Do you have the MinGW-w64 cross compiler?

[Curculigo]

I suggest new ports:

mingw-w64 for the GCC-based MinGW-w64 cross compiler and llvm-mingw for the LLVM-based MinGW-w64 cross compiler.

[jrmarino]

Cross compilers are heavy. We support gnatcross and that caused 21 variants over 4 ports.

Any other cross-compiler would require the same if it's supposed to be supported on all platforms.
Is a minGW cross-compiler more useful that building with a native minGW environment?

[Curculigo]

A native MinGW-w64 requires Windows.

[kraileth]

That's a fair point, I guess. Being one of those people who do not agree to the EULA and therefore cannot run Windows even though licenses for it came with my PCs, I can actually understand the need. What is your main platform?

[Curculigo]

What is your main platform?

Linux and FreeBSD.

[jrmarino]

cross compilers can't build everything because they often require native tools in the build process. typically one uses a cross compiler in order to bootstrap a native compiler.

The exception to this is the target has modest CPU or memory, and building would be slow, so the packages are built with cross compilers on foreign hosts, but one has to accept many packages can't be built to the issue I previously referenced.

[Curculigo]

MinGW-w64 only targets Windows and doesn't need any sysroot. It's different from the Ada cross compiler you mentioned.

[jrmarino]

one can't build a compiler without a system root.
Nor can you build it without binutils for the target system which also requires the system root.

[Curculigo]

MinGW-w64 includes its own sysroot (aka. runtime). MinGW-w64 only targets Windows, you don't need a sysroot package for each platforms like the Ada cross compiler.

https://www.mingw-w64.org/getting-started/archlinux/

[Curculigo]

https://pkgsrc.se/cross/mingw-w64

[jrmarino]

your pkgsrc example also has a system root (aka headers).

there are twice as many mingw ports there -- this is just the x86-64 version. there's another set to support the 32-bit target.

[jrmarino]

in case you don't know, while Ravenports is designed to be the only package system needed, if you find a package that is only available on another system (e.g. FreeBSD ports collection or Debian), you can actually use both.

meaning you could installed mingw cross compiler from FPC (running from /usr/local) and ravenports for everything else (running from /raven). There should be no conflict at all. obviously common binaries will be selected by search path priority.