Learning Go Notes - Crosscompiling

#go #crosscompiling

As part of my studies with Go, yesterday tried to compile a simple project to windows from my ubuntu linux, and I've got some small tips for that.

1 - To Crosscompile you just need to change 2 enviroment variables, GOARCH (the architecture of the processor) and GOOS (the operational system), you could do this by using export:

export GOARCH="amd64"

export GOOS="windows"

But this makes you need to revert it later.

For a 1 line approach you can pass the parameters before run build command.

GOOS=windows GOARCH=386 go build

2 - If you are using some C library with cgo, you gonna need to enable the CGO_ENABLED flag, and have the structure to compile the C library properly (mingw for windows and things like that). Ex:

GOOS=windows GOARCH=386 CGO_ENABLED=1 CC=i686-w64-mingw32-gcc CXX=i686-w64-mingw32-g++ go build -ldflags "-H windowsgui" <= this didn't work.

In some cases you can use xgo ( https://github.com/karalabe/xgo ):

xgo --targets=windows/* . would compile to windows.

It was relatively easy to crosscompile, lets check later with larger projects.
If you have some case to tell or some suggestion, please comment.