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gocross-compiling

All possible GOOS value?

If I get it right, GOOS is determined when compile the source code.

To better support multiple OS, I'm interested in what GOOS could be.

Of course, there might be infinite possibilities of it, since Go is opensourced. So what I really want is a "common list".

Known values are:

  • windows
  • linux
  • darwin or freebsd or unix? I know that at least one of them must exist.
Solution

  • Note that those values are defined in:

    With Go 1.5 (Q3 2015), GOARCH will become much more complete.
    See commit 1eebb91 by Minux Ma (minux)

    go/build: reserve GOARCH values for all common architectures

    Whenever we introduce a new GOARCH, older Go releases won't recognize them and this causes trouble for both our users and us (we need to add unnecessary build tags).

    Go 1.5 has introduced three new GOARCHes so far: arm64 ppc64 ppc64le, we can take the time to introduce GOARCHes for all common architectures that Go might support in the future to avoid the problem.

    const goosList = "android darwin dragonfly freebsd linux nacl \ 
  netbsd openbsd plan9 solaris windows "

const goarchList = "386 amd64 amd64p32 arm arm64 ppc64 ppc64le \
   mips mipsle mips64 mips64le mips64p32 mips64p32le \ # (new)
   ppc s390 s390x sparc sparc64 " # (new)

    The list is still being review in Change 9644, with comments like:

    I wouldn't bother with Itanium. It's basically a dead architecture.
    Plus, it's so hard to write a compiler for it that I really can't see it happening except as a labor of love, and nobody loves the Itanium.

    The official documentation now (GO 1.5+ Q3 2015) reflects that completed list.

    Update 2018: as documented in Giorgos Oikonomou's answer, Go 1.7 (Q1 2016) has introduced the
    go tool dist list command.
    See commit c3ecded: it fixes issue 12270 opened in Q3 2015:

    To easier write tooling for cross compiling it would be good to programmatically get the possible combinations of GOOS and GOARCH.

    This was implemented in CL 19837

    cmd/dist: introduce list subcommand to list all supported platforms

    You can list in plain text, or in json:

    > go tool dist list -json
[
        {
                "GOOS": "android",
                "GOARCH": "386",
                "CgoSupported": true
        },
        ...
]

    As Mark Bates tweeted:

    Bonus: Column output properly formatted for display:

    go tool dist list | column -c 75 | column -t