Our production stuff runs on Linux, so we just wrap it into docker and that's that.

Personally, I develop on Mac and it runs natively there the same as on Linux.

Windows binaries for the tooling releases I used to build with a cross-compiler, but more recently, GH actions looks attractive enough to take that role.

Edit: Sorry, could have been clearer. The build system is just running the binary directly via nim cpp -r in development, and for production it's nimble. The dockerfile is handcrafted, but of trivial complexity.

So you use Docker to keep the build system unchanged between builds? That’s genius if so and cuts deeply into MSBuild’s main advantage (comprehensively delineated system settings).

I think there might be a misunderstanding. I'm just talking about the multiplayer service infrastructure, not the whole game.

Despite doing a lot and having a lot of smaller moving parts, the mp infra is of moderate code size and build complexity is not a concern. The whole thing compiles in less than 5 minutes, and can be done with nimble (the package manager). We have a docker builder image that spits out the final production image containing the apps, and a docker-compose setup then runs those as needed.

Any kind of per-platform specifics are handled in nim itself (when defined(Linux): etc) and via nim.config/nims.nim, to link in platform libraries.

I use the Nim and GCC compilers from Debian in order to have guaranteed stable build system for 5+ years.