homebrew-musl-cross

Homebrew package manager formula to install cross-compiler toolchains targeting Linux boxes.

The default installation contains toolchains for x86 64-bit Linux (x86_64-linux-musl). Others can be installed with package options (see brew info).

Note, when using the toolchain, the generated binaries will only run on a system with musl libc installed. Either musl-based distributions like Alpine Linux or distributions having musl libc installed as separate packages (e.g., Debian/Ubuntu).

Binaries statically linked with musl libc (linked with -static) have no external dependencies, even for features like DNS lookups or character set conversions that are implemented with dynamic loading on glibc. The application can be deployed as a single binary file and run on any device with the appropriate ISA and Linux kernel or Linux syscall ABI emulation layer including bare docker containers.

Tool Versions:

• Linux 4.19.308
• musl libc 1.2.5
• For GCC:
  • GCC 13.2.0
  • binutils 2.42
• For Clang:
  • Clang 17.0.6

Partially based on:

• FiloSottile/homebrew-musl-cross
• MarioSchwalbe/homebrew-gcc-musl-cross

Depends on jthat/musl-cross-make to do the heavy lifting, which is in turn based on richfelker/musl-cross-make and the clang branch of apexrtos/musl-cross-make.

Usage

1. Install with Homebrew:

   $ brew tap jthat/musl-cross

• To use GCC:

  $ brew install musl-cross-gcc

• To use Clang:

  $ brew install musl-cross-clang

2. For dynamically linked applications, ensure the correct version of musl is installed on the target device.

3. Compile with <TARGET>-cc e.g., x86_64-linux-musl-cc, deploy, and run.

Supported Targets

• i686-linux-musl
• x86_64-linux-musl
• x86_64-linux-muslx32
• arm-linux-musleabi
• arm-linux-musleabihf
• aarch64-linux-musl
• mips-linux-musl
• mips64-linux-musl
• powerpc-linux-musl
• powerpc64-linux-musl
• s390x-linux-musl

Other targets or variants can be added easily by extending the hash OPTION_TARGET_MAP in the formula as long as musl-cross-make and musl libc also support them.