Target-Specific Libraries

All libraries that you compile as part of your build will be cross-compiled to your target, and your build system will probably find them in the right place. But all dependencies that are normally checked against (like libxml or libz etc) will match against the host platform, not the target.

So, if the build system is not aware that you want to cross-compile your code, it will get every dependency wrong, and your compilation will fail during build time, not configure time.

Also, finding the libraries for your target are not as easy as for your host machine. There aren’t many cross-libraries available as packages to most OS’s, so you’ll have to either cross-compile them from source, or download the package for your target platform, extract the libraries and headers, put them in specific directories and add -I

Also, some libraries have different dependencies on different targets, so configuration tools to find dependencies in the host can get the list wrong for the target platform. This means that the configuration of your build can get things wrong when setting their own library paths, and you’ll have to augment it via additional flags (configure, Make, CMake, etc).

Multilibs

When you want to cross-compile to more than one configuration, for example hard-float-ARM and soft-float-ARM, you’ll have to have multiple copies of your libraries and (possibly) headers.

Some Linux distributions have support for Multilib, which handle that for you in an easier way, but if you’re not careful and, for instance, forget to specify -ccc-gcc-namearmv7l-linux-gnueabihf-gcc (which uses hard-float), Clang will pick the armv7l-linux-gnueabi-ld (which uses soft-float) and linker errors will happen.

The same is true if you’re compiling for different ABIs, like gnueabi and androideabi, and might even link and run, but produce run-time errors, which are much harder to track down and fix.