An introduction to cross compilation with Go

Cross compiling is certainly necessary and useful for bootstrapping a new platform. It can also be a lot faster to cross compile when the target system is slow, but there is a well known drawback to using cross compiling to speed up development times; you are not stressing the target system, and hence, you've made target-specific bugs harder to find.

Of course, there can be substantial costs from slowing down builds and spending development time waiting for compilation on the actual (target) hardware. On the other hand, the advantages of finding target-specific bugs and adequately stressing the system can make the expense worthwhile. Bad hardware happens far more often than vendors like to admit, and stressing the system is a good way to test it.

As always, it's a trade-off.

The good example of taking the expensive but thorough approach is the OpenBSD project. After getting past bootstrapping an new platform, all builds are done on the actual (target) hardware. Since the code base is cross platform, the new platform could give them the benefit of finding bugs that don't manifest or are unnoticeable on all of the other supported platforms. Also, the OpenBSD project does pretty much continuous build of their tree on actual hardware, so they're always stressing the hardware to make sure it's working properly, as well as finding errant bugs that are tough to find on a single platform.

I did a quick grep of the go tree to search things that are unsuported by uClinux, but I haven't found any. It might just work.

edit: the CPU is ARMv4T, the gc Go compilers generate code only for ARMv5 and higher, so it will not work.