XGo

What is this?

This Go module is a drop-in replacement for go as it is a simple wrapper tool. It will parse your GOARCH and GOOS environment vars to determine which cross-compilers to use, if needed. It will then set the appropriate CC and CXX environment vars before calling the requested go subcommand. If the subcommand is build, get or install it will ensure some sane default flags are provided:

--buildvcs=false
--ldflags="-s -w"
--trimpath

If you specify these flags manually, then they will not be added or modified.

How to install

Open a terminal and run the following:

$ go install github.com/mjwhitta/xgo/cmd/xgo@latest

Usage

You can simply use xgo in place of go or create a shell alias:

Bash/Zsh

$ xgo build .
$ # OR
$ alias go="xgo" # Add this to your shell rc file
$ go build .

PowerShell

PS> xgo build .
PS> # OR
PS> set-alias -option allscope go xgo # Add this to your profile.ps1
PS> go build .

Additionally, if you do not want to set environment vars in PowerShell (because it's not as convenient as bash/zsh), there are two CLI options that could be useful to you: --goarch and --goos.

Scripts

There is a hidden -d/--debug CLI option that can be used to display the underlying shell command. The output is bash/zsh compatible on Darwin and Linux, and PowerShell on Windows. I never really meant to support that functionality, but I used it for debugging and figured somebody might find it useful someday.

$ GOOS=windows xgo -d build .

Cross-Compilers per host OS

Darwin hosts

To compile for Linux (386 and amd64):

$ brew install musl-cross --with-i468 --without-aarch64

To compile for Windows (386 and amd64):

$ brew install mingw-w64

For Zig support (really NOT recommended, doesn't fully work!):

$ brew install zig
$ export XGOZIG=1

Linux hosts

To compile for Darwin (amd64 and arm64) you will need to install osxcross. This requires grabbing your own copy of the macOS SDK. I have found this script on a macOS host with XCode Commandline Tools to be the easiest method. You will need to add XCODE_TOOLS=1 to line 2 of that script: Additionally, that repo appears broken as of 2024-07-05, but you can git checkout 2389e32b to rollback to a working version.

To compile for Linux (386) you will need to install gcc with multilib support.

To compile for Windows (386 and amd64) you will need to install MinGW-w64.

For Zig support (really NOT recommended, doesn't fully work!):

$ # Choose a command below for your package manager:
$ # apk add zig
$ # apt install zig
$ # apt-get install zig
$ # dnf install zig
$ # pacman -S zig
$ # zypper in zig
$ export XGOZIG=1

Windows hosts

To compile for Darwin (amd64 and arm64) you will need to install TODO.

To compile for Linux (386 and amd64) you will need to install TODO.

To compile for Windows (386) you will need to install TODO.

For Zig support (really NOT recommended, leaves all sorts of artifacts in your binaries):

PS> choco install zig
PS> $env:XGOZIG="1"

NOTE: Zig will allow for compiling of 386/amd64 Linux and Windows. I have not managed to get it to work for Darwin at this time.

TODO

Work on Windows (host) support

# Packages

# README

XGo