This post was originally published on fpira.com.
One of the advantages of Rust applications is the possibility to ship the same code across different targets, with many CPU architecture and operating systems setup supported as first-class citizen. In such scenario, cross compilation is a fundamental technique for developers who want their Rust applications to run on multiple platforms, as it would be highly unpractical to parallel develop and test on each of your targets. By configuring your development environment to target different architectures, you can build software that operates seamlessly across various systems, and by setting up CI/CD pipelines for cross compilation you can develop on one platform while building, testing, and shipping for all of them in an automated fashion.
In this article, I'll tell about how to move the first steps for cross compilation in Rust, address common challenges, and provide practical examples for a CI/CD environment.
Context
Consider a binary Rust application, one like appimage_updater. We have a rust-toolchain.toml file with the following content:
