> Last time I tried to cross compile RISC-V with Rust it just didn't work at all.
YMMV; my experience was actually the opposite, approximately an year ago. I was actually really surprised of being able to build na executable for RISC-V (that I then copied to a VM, and run) all by adding 4 lines to Cargo's config.toml.
Never done RISC-V, but for ARM, this is trivial, one just have to rustup the right target stdlib, and then pass --target to cargo and done.
Well, at least that's that easy if what you try to compile don't have C dependencies. For C dependencies, there is cross <https://github.com/cross-rs/cross> which I had good experiences with.
I would like to add that Zig is extremely cross-compilable. You can even use it to cross compile C/C++ projects.
And Nim is fairly easy to cross compile. Just output C or C++ and cross compile that. I don't know why people are saying that cross compiling C or C++ is so miserable. Yes, it's not always a one-liner, but that depends on the toolchain. For example, there is crosstool-ng. Also Linux distros tend to have cross compilers for many architectures right on the box these days.
Here is how to cross-compile to 64-bit RISC-V on my Ubuntu machine:
Debugging RISC-V and a heap of other architectures: