This is potentially very useful. Especially because it comes "batteries included" by cross compiling some important cross-platform libraries.
My experience with C and C++ is that, as great as the differences between Windows and Unix APIs are, the real friction comes from the differences in compilers and toolchains.
There is much good to be said about Visual Studio. But if you are interested in cross-platform, it is probably a lot easier to maintain a single Unix-based build system as long as you have an easy way to test the products under Windows.
The problem with cross-compiling is that one always requires the complete set of libraries to target, which in the end at least for desktop and server systems is much more convenient to have a VM instance for it than a cross-compiler.
Wow. To be honest, that's what most "Windows screenshots" look like for non-Windows projects. For some reason people have an aversion to newer versions of Windows and Aero is usually disabled for screenshots. Similar thing is when people call GUI like here: http://i.stack.imgur.com/Qdbsi.png "windows native"
I am using MXE happily for a couple of years already (some projects I've cross-compiled are here: http://richelbilderbeek.nl/CppMxe.htm ). IMHO it is awesome! Before MXE, I had a Windows computer with the only purpose to compile my code on. Life is better now.
Any similar projects aimed at compiling Linux binaries on non-Linux Unix? (Excluding qemu, etc.)
Some non-Linux Unix have Linux emulation and can translate a subset of Linux syscalls. Perhaps it could be in a chroot with all the needed Linux libraries and utils.
But I am curious if there have been existing projects aimed at this goal.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 64.2 ms ] threadBut it is difficult to imagine what is compiled by the MingGW toolchain other than Windows binaries.
Arguably the table entries "i686-w64-mingw32" and "x86_64-w64-mingw32" also explicitly name Windows, in a very cryptic, GNU-specific way.
My experience with C and C++ is that, as great as the differences between Windows and Unix APIs are, the real friction comes from the differences in compilers and toolchains.
There is much good to be said about Visual Studio. But if you are interested in cross-platform, it is probably a lot easier to maintain a single Unix-based build system as long as you have an easy way to test the products under Windows.
https://github.com/FiloSottile/homebrew-musl-cross
$ brew install FiloSottile/musl-cross/musl-cross
It's pretty cool seeing these long lived projects going from strength to strength
Apparently there are now 222 cross-compiled Windows packages: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/packages/mingw-%2A/
(Disclaimer: I was involved with this project at the beginning, but I've not used it for a while)
Some non-Linux Unix have Linux emulation and can translate a subset of Linux syscalls. Perhaps it could be in a chroot with all the needed Linux libraries and utils.
But I am curious if there have been existing projects aimed at this goal.