What build pipeline produces the most performant static binary for windows?

[Jay S]

Hi all,

Right now I am building a static x64 binary of tesseract 5.5.1 using vcpkg + Visual Studio 2022.

I'm following this guide:  https://tesseract-ocr.github.io/tessdoc/Compiling.html#windows 

I bootstrapped vcpkg and ran vcpkg install tesseract:x64-windows-static and now the build process is churning away.

However, I was reading on Mannheim University Library's build page here: https://github.com/UB-Mannheim/tesseract/wiki/Windows-build

That they prefer to compile the windows binaries by cross-building from Linux. This is an exact quote (emphasis mine):

Cross building means that we compile on Linux, but the resulting programs will run on Windows. This is our preferred way to build Tesseract for Windows because it is much faster than a native build on Windows. The instructions here are for Debian GNU Linux, but also work for other Debian based Linux distributions like for example Ubuntu. Other Linux distributions need more or less modifications of these instructions.

Do they mean that the resulting binary they generate is actually faster because it was cross-compiled from Linux, or that the compile time is faster?

I just want to make sure I am building a binary that is as performant as possible.

Sorry if this is a rookie question, I know little about C++ development.

Any further information would be greatly appreciated!

Jay