Guix gets cross-compilation support

Recently, Guix gained cross-compilation support. What this means is that existing package definitions can be reused to cross compile packages. So for instance one can cross-compile Guile and its dependencies for MIPS with:

guix build --target=mips64el-linux-gnu guile 

This may sound like an unexpected feature for a "package manager". In fact, it is particularly useful when porting the GNU system distribution to new platforms. The distribution being self-contained, it is bootstrapped from a small set of pre-built binaries. With cross-compilation support, porting to a new platform boils down to cross-compiling the bootstrap binaries for that platform.

Unless otherwise stated, blog posts on this site are copyrighted by their respective authors and published under the terms of the CC-BY-SA 4.0 license and those of the GNU Free Documentation License (version 1.3 or later, with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts).