How to Cross Compile Go Programs

If you download the Go binary for a particular platform, most likely that go binary distribution does not come with support for cross-compiling.

cd myapp
GOOS=windows GOARCH=amd64 go build

go build runtime: windows/amd64 must be bootstrapped using make.bash

In order to add support for cross-compiling in your Go distribution, you need to do the following.

cd $GOROOT/src
GOOS=windows GOARCH=amd64 ./make.bash --no-clean

In this example I am adding cross-compile support to target Windows 64-bit.

cd myapp
GOOS=windows GOARCH=amd64 go build

Now you can easily build Windows 64-bit binaries on a Linux.