Libraries for cross-compilation to x86_64-pc-windows-gnu

[DwarfsLord]

Hello,
newbie here, so I probably missed something obvious.

I am trying to cross-compile from linux (arch) to "x86_64-pc-windows".
My project relies on diesel (database ORM) which in turn depends on libmysqlclient.

Everyting compiles fine for "x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu", but I am getting following error when I do:

cross build --release --target x86_64-pc-windows-gnu

linking with x86_64-w64-mingw32-gcc failed: exit status: 1
[...]
note: /usr/bin/x86_64-w64-mingw32-ld: cannot find -lmysqlclient
collect2: error: ld returned 1 exit status

I tried to have a Dockerfile with this:

FROM ghcr.io/cross-rs/x86_64-pc-windows-gnu:latest

RUN dpkg --add-architecture x86-64 &&
apt-get update &&
apt-get install --assume-yes libmysqlclient-dev

but still get the same error.

So, how do I get these libraries?
Or am I misunderstanding my problem?

Thank you for any help!

[Alexhuszagh]

The target you are building for, x86_64-pc-windows-gnu, is using GCC for a Windows target, but the host OS is x86_64 Linux GNU. So, installing libmysqlclient-dev via apt installs it for x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu. If you would like to use a crate depending on your library, you'll have to build it from source or use a package manager that has it built. Some packages, like libz-mingw-w64-dev, are available from official repositories, but many others aren't.

A few tools and frameworks help for this. For example, vcpkg could let you use it as part of your build step, or you can download it from source and compile it with our toolchain. You can also use MXE (M Cross-Environment).