xgo

README

Fork

This repository is a fork of karalabe/xgo to push images and tags to an unique docker repository to make things more consistent for users.

I use GitHub Actions and his matrix strategy to build the images instead of using automated builds of Docker Hub (see workflows folder).

This also creates a standalone xgo executable that can be used on many platforms.

About

Although Go strives to be a cross platform language, cross compilation from one platform to another is not as simple as it could be, as you need the Go sources bootstrapped to each platform and architecture.

The first step towards cross compiling was Dave Cheney's golang-crosscompile package, which automatically bootstrapped the necessary sources based on your existing Go installation. Although this was enough for a lot of cases, certain drawbacks became apparent where the official libraries used CGO internally: any dependency to third party platform code is unavailable, hence those parts don't cross compile nicely (native DNS resolution, system certificate access, etc).

A step forward in enabling cross compilation was Alan Shreve's gonative package, which instead of bootstrapping the different platforms based on the existing Go installation, downloaded the official pre-compiled binaries from the golang website and injected those into the local toolchain. Since the pre-built binaries already contained the necessary platform specific code, the few missing dependencies were resolved, and true cross compilation could commence... of pure Go code.

However, there was still one feature missing: cross compiling Go code that used CGO itself, which isn't trivial since you need access to OS specific headers and libraries. This becomes very annoying when you need access only to some trivial OS specific functionality (e.g. query the CPU load), but need to configure and maintain separate build environments to do it.

Documentation

• Enter xgo
• Installation
• Usage
  • Build flags
  • Go releases
  • Output prefixing
  • Branch selection
  • Remote selection
  • Package selection
  • Limit build targets
  • Platform versions
  • CGO dependencies

How can I help ?

All kinds of contributions are welcome 🙌!
The most basic way to show your support is to star 🌟 the project, or to raise issues 💬
But we're not gonna lie to each other, I'd rather you buy me a beer or two 🍻!

License

MIT. See LICENSE for more details.

Documentation

Overview

Wrapper around the GCO cross compiler docker container.