Hi all! I am trying to use PackageCompiler to build a stand-alone app. Since I need to potentially ship it to different host systems, I need to cross-compile my project. The PackageCompiler’s docs say nothing about it (they really just explain how to use the basic tool), but peeking into the source…

I’m not familiar with PackageCompiler internals, but my guess is that you don’t find anything about cross-compilation in the docs simply because you can’t: julia isn’t a cross-compiler at the moment. JULIA_CPU_TARGET is only to choose a specific microarchitecture within the host architecture, but y…

I see, thanks. It could be possible in principle, tho, right? For instance, translating Julia code to LLVM, then compiling with clang passing the cross-compilation flag?

In principle, yes, that’s actually what GPUCompiler.jl does (without involving clang) for generating code for GPUs and other kind of devices, but on x86_64 the llvm which comes with julia by default doesn’t have the arm backend, so you can’t that architecture, and viceversa you can’t really target…

Thanks! My knowledge of LLVM is far from good, but I thought the LLVM-IR was enough high-level to be portable. Is that not true?

LLVM-IR itself is agnostic to the OS/platform you target, but julia itself (which produces that LLVM-IR) isn’t aware of that. You can think of it more-or-less as julia assuming that all code it generates will run on the same machine it is generated on (with all nastiness that entails, like OS specif…

[image] Sukera: LLVM-IR itself is agnostic to the OS/platform you target Mostly true, but not entirely, some intrinsics are backend-specific.

[image] giordano: some intrinsics are backend-specific. As far as I know, that’s more a case of not all backends supporting everything in the IR, right? Are there actually some special invocations in the IR that only work on a single backend?

I think llvm.vscale is aarch64-specific in practice? And I’ve seen lots of (maybe undocumented) llvm.<backend> intrinsics. It’s true that you can have “valid” target-agnostic LLVM IR to a certain extent, but it may not be optimal for some targets, or actively bad, for example if you get vector regi…

Hi, Maybe it’s a far fetch suggestion, but if you consider you PackageCompiler App as a “binary” you are building for multi-platforms, maybe you can use BinaryBuild.jl . I don’t know if it is possible (how to get the app artifact?) but it is how I would try.

Thanks to all! Well, that’s a bummer, having binary code from pure Julia would have been just perfect. A possible workaround I can think of is to have multiple versions of Julia installed with juliaup, then using PackageCompiler with Qemu, but I don’t know if it’s possible. Anyway, for now I think I…

How to cross-compile using PackageCompiler?

General Usage

giordano June 19, 2023, 6:50pm 11

@bertulli already asked that very same question (and no, it doesn’t work)

Topic		Replies	Views
Any existing efforts on cross-compiling Julia programs across different platforms? Internals & Design compilation , cross-platform , internals	3	533	August 17, 2024
PackageCompiler.jl: Best practices to create cross-platform relocatable app? General Usage package-compiler	4	978	April 16, 2024
Determining whether julia is "self-built" or "shipped" New to Julia	6	1230	October 2, 2019
Use PackageCompiler to produce EXE on non-VM, execute on VM gives "ERROR: Unable to find compatible target in system image" General Usage	2	1276	April 25, 2019
Understanding JULIA_CPU_TARGET New to Julia precompilation	5	1187	July 9, 2024

How to cross-compile using PackageCompiler?

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