Go/Golang Cross-Compile from Mac to Windows: fatal error: 'windows.h' file not found

Summary: when I try cross-compiling a .go source file that includes a C file somewhere in the file chain, targeting Windows AMD64 from a Mac host, I get:

/usr/local/go/src/runtime/cgo/gcc_windows_amd64.c:8:10: fatal error: 'windows.h' file not found

Purely Go code seems to cross compile without error; is there a way to get the proper header files for cross compilation when C files are involved?

More details: I installed LiteIDE on my Mac for working on some .go projects, and LiteIDE makes it relatively simple to target other platforms as build targets. I tested it on a small test project I had, purely Go, and it seemed to run without error.

Later I tried it on a current, larger project and had to adjust several env settings in the IDE to get it to work (complaints about C files without CGO enabled, and GOPATH not set properly even though it's set in .bash_profile and verified in echo $VARIABLE just fine.) The result is

/usr/local/go/src/runtime/cgo/gcc_windows_amd64.c:8:10: fatal error: 'windows.h' file not found

Trying to target Linux (os linux, arch amd64) gives

# runtime/cgo
ld: unknown option: --build-id=none
clang: error: linker command failed with exit code 1 (use -v to see invocation)

I've double checked I have XCode installed; gcc is installed:

Configured with: --prefix=/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/usr with-gxx-include-     dir=/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/MacOSX.platform/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.11.sdk/usr/include/c++/4.2.1
Apple LLVM version 7.3.0 (clang-703.0.29)
Target: x86_64-apple-darwin15.4.0
Thread model: posix
InstalledDir: /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Toolchains/XcodeDefault.xctoolchain/usr/bin

...and Go is the latest version:

go version go1.6.2 darwin/amd64

I also checked that this isn't just from LiteIDE (since LiteIDE seems to override env settings and ignore what's in the terminal?); an example attempt at the console gives:

MyUsername$ env GOOS=windows GOARCH=amd64 CGO_ENABLED=1 go build -v
golang.org/x/net/html/atom
runtime/cgo
golang.org/x/crypto/ssh/terminal
golang.org/x/net/html
github.com/howeyc/gopass
# runtime/cgo
/usr/local/go/src/runtime/cgo/gcc_windows_amd64.c:8:10: fatal error: 'windows.h' file not found
github.com/andybalholm/cascadia
github.com/PuerkitoBio/goquery

I suspect this is because the application uses networking libraries in Go and I think the native libraries are still calling some C files to fill in gaps. Is there a way to get the proper libraries for building on Linux/Windows or does this need to be done on the target platforms in order to work?

Building native applications on the host platform seems to work without issue.

To enable cross-compiling for CGO you need to have a local toolchain that can compile C code for that target.

I'm not very familiar with Mac OS X, but on Arch Linux all I had to do was install mingw-w64-toolchain and compile my go code with:

env GOOS="windows" GOARCH="386"   CGO_ENABLED="1" CC="i686-w64-mingw32-gcc"   go build
// or to target win 64
env GOOS="windows" GOARCH="amd64" CGO_ENABLED="1" CC="x86_64-w64-mingw32-gcc" go build

On OSX, you can install mingw with homebrew: brew install mingw-w64

About the other error message though, ld: unknown option: --build-id=none seems like a bug, you might want to report that on the Go issue tracker.