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Comment by batbomb | Hacker News Reader

Ditto on the Darwin builds.

Since Apple ditched the Xserve forever ago and the legal issues of Mac OSX on non-apple hardware, builds on mac are a pain in the ass for everyone. You get to buy your Mac Pro, deal with VMware when you want to build for more than one OS (which of course means someone always loses days at a time doing something minor), and hope you have a nice 6U square peg available for your cylindrical trashcan peg.

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Not 6U, a pair of mac pros needs only 4U of rack space.

http://www.sonnettech.com/product/rackmacpro.html

Seems like overkill, with the unused graphics capabilities, I guess the cards could be removed. Could a couple of macbook pros fit into a 1U?

Well most of the computing power is in the GPU, so for some sort of specific application you could take advantage of them, but for this sort of thing, yeah, it's not a great fit. I'm not sure about laptops. You could probably do it, but there was an article on here a while ago about using chromebooks for ARM native compilation, and the result was that the machines weren't quite up to it. The load would kill the machines and cause their batteries to swell up alarmingly. I'm not sure if a macbook would fare better.

These days, if you have a portable project that builds on both Windows and Linux, it's fairly easy to set up a MinGW-based cross-compiler and do all your builds on Linux. Does anyone have a useful cross-compilation environment for OS X? Clang and GCC should both be quite capable, so the primary issue would be obtaining the necessary headers and (possibly stub) libraries.

>>These days, if you have a portable project that builds on both Windows and Linux, it's fairly easy to set up a MinGW-based cross-compiler and do all your builds on Linux.

That isn't very useful if part of what you are testing are builds on OSX.

Go OSX build have broken due to very Apple specific issues before.

> > These days, if you have a portable project that builds on both Windows and Linux, it's fairly easy to set up a MinGW-based cross-compiler and do all your builds on Linux.

> That isn't very useful if part of what you are testing are builds on OSX.

That's probably why the next sentence in the post you are responding to was the following question:

> > Does anyone have a useful cross-compilation environment for OS X?

Why not buy a Mac Mini?

Slow.

Slow is better then not at all in my books.

This discussion is taking place in the context of trying to speed up our build bots. We already have slow mac minis.

A customized MD389LL (2.6 Ghz i7, 16 GB RAM, 2 x 256 GB SSD) would be quite mean actually!

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