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Support cross compilation on macOS #90905
Description
| BPO | 46749 |
|---|---|
| Nosy | @ronaldoussoren, @ned-deily, @moreati, @autoantwort |
Note: these values reflect the state of the issue at the time it was migrated and might not reflect the current state.
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GitHub fields:
assignee = None
closed_at = None
created_at = <Date 2022-02-14.14:23:11.267>
labels = ['OS-mac', 'type-feature', '3.11']
title = 'Support cross compilation on macOS'
updated_at = <Date 2022-02-14.21:25:37.996>
user = 'https://github.com/autoantwort'bugs.python.org fields:
activity = <Date 2022-02-14.21:25:37.996>
actor = 'ned.deily'
assignee = 'none'
closed = False
closed_date = None
closer = None
components = ['macOS']
creation = <Date 2022-02-14.14:23:11.267>
creator = 'autoantwort'
dependencies = []
files = []
hgrepos = []
issue_num = 46749
keywords = []
message_count = 2.0
messages = ['413224', '413265']
nosy_count = 4.0
nosy_names = ['ronaldoussoren', 'ned.deily', 'Alex.Willmer', 'autoantwort']
pr_nums = []
priority = 'normal'
resolution = None
stage = None
status = 'open'
superseder = None
type = 'enhancement'
url = 'https://bugs.python.org/issue46749'
versions = ['Python 3.11']
Activity
autoantwort commentedon Feb 14, 2022
Currently you get the following output:
Is "needed" for microsoft/vcpkg#22603
ned-deily commentedon Feb 14, 2022
We don't currently support cross-building a single macOS architecture on another, i.e. building an x86_64 only build on an Apple Silicon Mac. However, we do support building a multi-architecture build on either on current releases of Python 3.9 and 3.10, with what is known as a universal or fat build. In this case, you'd want to add these two options:
./configure --enable-universalsdk --with-universal-archs=universal2 ...
For this to succeed, you will also need to provide universal builds of any of the third-party libraries used by standard modules you need and that are not otherwise provided by macOS, the most common being OpenSSL and XZ (and perhaps newer versions of SQLite and Tcl/Tk). For the most part, those are straightforward to build yourself but also may be available through some third-party distributors like MacPorts and possibly HomeBrew. The Mac/README.rst file in repo has some more details about universal builds and there may be some useful hints at building the third-party libraries in Mac/BuildScript/build-installer.py although it is not intended to be used for this purpose. The resulting universal2 build can be used as is on either Intel-64 or Apple Silicon Macs but, if you truly need to have only Intel binaries you should be able to use the macOS lipo command to separate out the desired architecture from the built executables and shared libraries into other files. If you want to run these binaries on a range of macOS versions, you can also set the MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET environment variable when building the libs and Python; we currently test and support back to 10.9.
directhex commentedon Aug 18, 2023
Strictly speaking, the build system does expose the ability to do a single architecture multi-architecture build -
--enable-universalsdk --with-universal-archs=intel-64. Whilst it doesn't technically use the--hostand--buildflags, the end result is the same: you can build an x64-only Python for Mac on arm64.The reverse, however, is not true - there is no value for
--with-universal-archsin the build system which targets arm64 exclusively.That said, the
--with-universal-archsvalues in configure are ancient - untouched for a decade. There are 8 values:I would question the utility of most of this. Does Python really CI on Mac OS X 10.5 (the last version to run on POWER)? That also means Xcode 3.x - with GCC 4.2.
At the absolute bare minimum, there should be a value for arm64, which provides single-arch universal builds and the equivalent to cross-compilation. And AC_CHECK_SIZEOF does assume the target architecture runs on the build system (which is true for M1 Macs which can execute AMD64 Mac binaries, but the reverse isn't true) - some mild massaging of configure.ac is needed to avoid that requirement.
gh-90905: Allow cross-compilation on macOS (#128385)
Andrej730 commentedon Sep 26, 2025
Can confirm that
--enable-universalsdk --with-universal-archs=intel-64works for cross compiling intel binaries on arm64 for Python 3.9-3.13. Though there was some problem building it on 3.13.0 and had to switch to 3.13.6 and it worked.I guess on Python 3.14 more straightforward
../configure --host=x86_64-apple-darwin --build=arm64-apple-darwin --with-build-python=./python3.14will be available, but will require additional Python 3.14 installed on the system, so using universal sdk still may be a viable option.