cross-cgo

This is a simple example of how to cross-compile a Go program that uses CGO.

Overview

Most of the time, cross-compiling a Go program is as simple as setting the GOOS and GOARCH environment variables. However, when you use CGO, things get a bit more complicated. This is because CGO uses the C compiler and linker to build the Go program, and these tools are platform-specific.

This example shows how to cross-compile a Go program that uses CGO. It uses official golang Docker image to build the program for different platforms:

• Linux (glibc/musl) - amd64, arm64
• Windows - amd64, arm64, i386
• macOS - amd64, arm64, universal2

The cross-compilation has been tested on macOS and Linux. It should work on Windows as well, but I haven't tested it.

The main dependencies is zig (as C compiler and linker) and MacOSX SDK (for macOS target). The build script will download and install these dependencies automatically.

The example program is a simple Go program that uses SQLite via CGO. You can run the program with the following command:

# build for all platforms
make all
# run the program (choose the correct binary for your platform, e.g. linux-amd64)
./dist/linux-amd64/demo --database-url sqlite3://./test.sqlite3

Issues

Zig version must be 0.14.0 or later due to this issue: ziglang/zig#20243

Cross-compiling for macOS on other platforms must add -w flag to ldflags to avoid DWARF generation error. (dsymutil is not available on other platforms).

Error occurs: error: unable to create compilation: AccessDenied. Run go mod vendor to keep the dependencies in the project can fix this issue (I don't know why).

Glibc version: you can specify the glibc version for Linux build by setting LINUX_GLIBC_VERSION in Makefile, default is 2.17 (CentOS 7 compatible).