[Teknoman117]

As someone who has also spent two decades wrangling C/C++ codebases, I wholeheartedly agree with every statement here.

I have an even stronger sentiment regarding cross compilation though - In any build system, I think the distinction between “cross” and “non-cross” compilation is an anti-pattern.

Always design build systems assuming cross compilation. It hurts nothing if it just so happens that your host and target platform/architecture end up being the same, and saves you everything down the line if you need to also build binaries for something else.

[bsder]

> In any build system, I think the distinction between “cross” and “non-cross” compilation is an anti-pattern.

This is one of the huge wins of Zig. Any Zig host compiler can produce output for any supported target. Cross compiling becomes straightforward.

[sebastos]

Amen. It always baffled me that cross compiling was ever considered a special, weird, off-nominal thing. I’d love to understand the history of that better, because it seems like it should have been obvious from the start that building for the exact same computer you’re compiling from is a special case.

[Teknoman117]

A few things come to mind, but I wasn't even alive then so what do I know XD.

On one hand, it seems rather strange, because back in the early days of C (and later C++) there were far more CPU architectures in play. Every big Unix hardware vendor had their own CPU architecture, whereas today we only have about six. (In my mind: x86, arm, mips, risc-v, ppc, and s390x)

But it might be that in the early days of C/C++, development involved connecting to large shared Unix environments where the machine you developed on what always the machine (or at least the same type of machine) the program would run on, and also that those vendors weren't exactly incentivized to make developing for competitor's architectures easy.