Comment by wryun
7 days ago
Surprising. Cross compilation too annoying to set up? No CI pipelines for things you're actually deploying?
(I'm keen about ARM and RISC-V systems, but I can never actually justify them given the spotty Linux situation and no actual use case)
Cross compilation is a pain to set up, especially if you're relying on system libraries for anything. Even dynamically linking against glibc is a pain when cross compiling.
Linux on arm is probably the most popular computing device platform in the world.
Which doesn't mean that it's easy to use an ARM device in the way I'd want to (i.e. as a trouble-free laptop or desktop with complete upstream kernel support).
We do have ARM CI pipelines now, but I can only imagine what a nightmare they would have been to set up without any ability to locally debug bits that were broken for architectural reasons.
I guess you must be doing trickier things than I ever have. I've found docker's emulation via qemu pretty reliable, and I'd be pretty surprised if there was a corner case that wouldn't show on it but would show on a native system.
Not really trickier, but different stack - we’re a .NET stack with a pile of linters, analyzers, tests, etc. No emulation, everything run natively on both x86-64 and ARM64. (But prior to actually running/debugging it on arm64, had various hang-ups.)
Native is also much faster than qemu emulation - I have a personal (non-.NET) project where I moved the CI from docker/qemu for x86+arm builds to separate x86+arm runners, and it cut the runtime from 10 minutes in total to 2 minutes per runner.
It's more surprising to me that software isn't portable enough that you can develop locally on x86-64. And then have a proper pipeline that produces the official binaries.
Outside the embedded space, cross-compilation really is a fool's errand: either your software is not portable (which means it's not future-proof), or you are targeting an architecture that is not commercially viable.
> It's more surprising to me that software isn't portable enough that you can develop locally on x86-64. And then have a proper pipeline that produces the official binaries.
This is what we largely do - my entire team other than me is on x86, but setting up the ARM pipelines (on GitHub Actions runners) would have been a real pain without being able to debug issues locally.