Mirror of forum.nim-lang.org

7398 :: Portable binaries with Nim - what works?

• drkameleon (orginal) [2021-01-18T06:29:14+01:00] view original

  I've been experimenting a bit with the idea of being able to serve binaries to every possible OS, instead of having the users need some sort of installer and/or first installing Nim and then compiling the generated C code and all that. It would definitely make the whole process much much easier.

  So... I have for example tried using the artifacts/binaries generated by GitHub Actions under ubuntu 16.04, 18.04 and 20.04 and they are all working beautifull out-of-the-box in any of the three (even vanilla installations).

  However, building on macOS Catalina (10.15) or Big Sur (11.0+) and trying the binary on High Sierra wasn't very successful (I have read that it would be better to build on High Sierra and then try the binary on Big Sur, that is the other way around, but since I don't personally have a machine with High Sierra that's not the easiest thing to try. I've also seen the recommendation to use the MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET option, but I haven't tried that either)

  What is your personal experience with what I'm saying?

  I mean... are you generally able to compile a program on X and just send the binary to another machine? Which combinations work for you?

---

• PMunch (orginal) [2021-01-18T09:43:06+01:00] view original

  In general you should be able to compile a program on one machine and send to others. You can even cross-compile from one machine to other machines and architectures. For example I build Windows 64 and 32 bit versions from my 64 bit Linux machine for distribution. Keep in mind though that you have to match the architecture, so 32/64 bit, Intel vs. ARM (e.g. Apple silicon), etc. Not quite sure what the issue you have with High Sierra is though, possibly just some flags you need to pass during compilation.

---

• ggibson (orginal) [2021-01-18T13:44:46+01:00] view original

  @drkameleon my empathies because Apple does not make this easy. In fact, the community has created a repository of old SDKs because Apple fails to make them available (https://github.com/phracker/MacOSX-SDKs) . Even so, this was a pain to figure out since I don't have a mac and yml-push-run-check is a slow annoying workflow. Hopefully looking at prior solutions will save you some time. Be sure to search GithubActions for community-created Nim-related actions. There may be some new ones or updates I'm unaware of. But if you want to see someone doing what you're talking about by hand, you can check out my gh actions file for mac/win/linux: https://github.com/JorySchossau/mabe-build-tool/blob/master/.github/workflows/ghactions.yml Please ping back here if you figure out ARM as I haven't looked into it yet :) - should be easy though? Final note, I use amazing UPX to further decrease executable size, and upx on mac was hard to get/get working so I just store the binary. Good luck

---