Meson has native support for cross compilation, which is also partially integrated into the abuild-meson wrapper which most packages use. It is also quickly becoming the most popular build system for C software.

Currently, pmbootstrap uses some tricks to run the native cross compiler version of gcc instead of running it through QEMU when building packages for other architectures. However, this is still much much slower than proper cross compilation since the build system itself (running in Python in the case of meson) as well as other associated scripts and tools (and abuild itself!) are all still running through QEMU.

It should be possible to have packages which use meson for building utilise abuild's cross compiler support, by installing build dependencies in the foreign arch buildroot, mounting it inside the native chroot and then invoking abuild in the native chroot and pointing it at the foreign arch buildroot for headers, pkgconfig, and shared libraries. This is the classical way to cross compile software.

This milestone is to track implementing support for building in this manner, with the end goal being that QEMU user is not used for any parts of the build process.

Related issue on abuild git: https://gitlab.alpinelinux.org/alpine/abuild/-/issues/10148