xgo - Go CGO cross compiler

Although Go strives to be a cross platform language, cross compilation from one platform to another is not as simple as it could be, as you need the Go sources bootstrapped to each platform and architecture.

The first step towards cross compiling was Dave Cheney's golang-crosscompile package, which automatically bootstrapped the necessary sources based on your existing Go installation. Although this was enough for a lot of cases, certain drawbacks became apparent where the official libraries used CGO internally: any dependency to third party platform code is unavailable, hence those parts don't cross compile nicely (native DNS resolution, system certificate access, etc).

A step forward in enabling cross compilation was Alan Shreve's gonative package, which instead of bootstrapping the different platforms based on the existing Go installation, downloaded the official pre-compiled binaries from the golang website and injected those into the local toolchain. Since the pre-built binaries already contained the necessary platform specific code, the few missing dependencies were resolved, and true cross compilation could commence... of pure Go code.

However, there was still one feature missing: cross compiling Go code that used CGO itself, which isn't trivial since you need access to OS specific headers and libraries. This becomes very annoying when you need access only to some trivial OS specific functionality (e.g. query the CPU load), but need to configure and maintain separate build environments to do it.

Enter xgo

My solution to the challenge of cross compiling Go code with embedded C snippets (i.e. CGO_ENABLED=1) is based on the concept of lightweight Linux containers. All the necessary Go tool-chains, C cross compilers and platform headers/libraries have been assembled into a single Docker container, which can then be called as if a single command to compile a Go package to various platforms and architectures.

Installation

Although you could build the container manually, it is available as an automatic trusted build from Docker's container registry (~530MB):

docker pull karalabe/xgo-latest

To prevent having to remember a potentially complex Docker command every time, a lightweight Go wrapper was written on top of it.

go get github.com/karalabe/xgo

Usage

Simply specify the import path you want to build, and xgo will do the rest:

$ xgo github.com/project-iris/iris
...

$ ls -al
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root     root  3086860 Aug  7 10:01 iris-darwin-386
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root     root  3941068 Aug  7 10:01 iris-darwin-amd64
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root     root  4185144 Aug  7 10:01 iris-linux-386
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root     root  5196784 Aug  7 10:01 iris-linux-amd64
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root     root  4151688 Aug  7 10:01 iris-linux-arm
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root     root  4228608 Aug  7 10:01 iris-windows-386.exe
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root     root  5243904 Aug  7 10:01 iris-windows-amd64.exe

Go releases

As newer versions of the language runtime, libraries and tools get released, these will get incorporated into xgo too as extensions layers to the base cross compilation image (only Go 1.3 and above will be supported).

You can select which Go release to work with through the -go command line flag to xgo and if the specific release was already integrated, it will automatically be retrieved and installed.

$ xgo -go 1.3.0 github.com/project-iris/iris
...

Since xgo depends on not only the official releases, but also on Dave Cheney's ARM packages, there will be a slight delay between official Go updates and the xgo updates.

Additionally, a few wildcard release strings are also supported:

• -go latest will use the latest Go release
• -go 1.3.x will use the latest point release of a specific Go version