saurik's reply to your comment feels to me like the epitome of the seasoned C/C++ developer _who is able and willing_ to put up with the tooling setup pains tha

saurik's reply to your comment feels to me like the epitome of the seasoned C/C++ developer _who is able and willing_ to put up with the tooling setup pains that make C/C++ a non-starter to the "average" developer today. You can absolutely set up a cross-compiling C/C++ toolchain today as he said - but you're going to have to find the right packages in your distro, deal with the MacOS linking issue, get a copy of the android NDK, make sure you're installing the right package versions, muck around with libc, etc. That doesn't make for a delightful start to a new weekend project. It's often underestimated just how substantial "setup pains" are IMO. I suspect most people who have a strong distaste for C/C++ mostly despise the tooling and installation hell. The novel part of what Zig, (and maybe Rust/Go to a lesser extent) are doing with cross-compilation is not 'making cross compilation possible' - it's having 'the best experience' out of the box, with zero installation pain. Zig has a ton of issues and is super early stages still. But shipping out-of-the-box with a Zig/C/C++ cross-compiler, with libc, static libc(musl), compiler-rt, libunwind, libcxx, etc. for ~50 cross-compilation targets, and solving the MacOS cross-compilation linking issue (with their customer linker, zld) is IMO a huge deal because it lowers the barrier to entry to systems programming quite substantially.