One-click static-friendly musl-based GCC macOS-to-Linux cross-compilers based on richfelker/musl-cross-make.

brew install filosottile/musl-cross/musl-cross

By default it will install full cross compiler toolchains targeting musl Linux amd64, arm64, and arm.

You can then use the x86_64-linux-musl- or aarch64-linux-musl- or arm-linux-musleabihf- prefixed tools to build for the target. For example x86_64-linux-musl-cc will compile C code to run on musl Linux amd64.

The "musl" part of the target is important: the binaries will ONLY run on a musl-based system, like Alpine. However, if you build them as static binaries by passing -static as an LDFLAG they will run anywhere. Musl is specifically engineered to support static binaries.

To use this as a Go cross-compiler for cgo, use CC, GOOS/GOARCH, CGO_ENABLED, and -extldflags.

CC=x86_64-linux-musl-gcc CGO_ENABLED=1 GOOS=linux GOARCH=amd64 \
    go build -trimpath -ldflags "-extldflags -static"

To use this with Rust, add an entry to .cargo/config.toml and use the corresponding target.

[target.x86_64-unknown-linux-musl]
linker = "x86_64-linux-musl-gcc"

Other architectures are supported. Run brew options filosottile/musl-cross/musl-cross to see all available architectures.

(Note: a custom build takes around ten minutes per architecture on an M2 MacBook Air. The installed size is between 200MB and 500MB per architecture.)

If you encounter issues with a missing musl-gcc binary, the build system might be assuming the presence of the musl host compiler wrapper. That should be reported as an issue, but you might be able to workaround it by creating a symlink:

ln -s "$(brew --prefix musl-cross)/bin/x86_64-linux-musl-gcc" /usr/local/bin/musl-gcc