The name of the command isn't important, but the functionality is. Our use case is for testing large and complicated sketches as native applications on the host.

Desired functionality: build a library as a normal Arduino build that omits only main.cpp.o from core.a. Toolchain configuration to build for the host would be provided through a user's custom platform.txt and board.txt.

Use case: keyboard.io develops keyboard firmware, and we would love to have a native environment where we can do sophisticated testing involving simulation of the hardware. The firmware is highly customizable and extensible, but testing it is currently a highly manual endeavor involving flashing firmware onto a physical keyboard and actually typing. In particular this would allow us to incorporate arduino-cli into a larger build system and link against test and simulation libraries not built by any form of the Arduino build process. Concretely, we'd like to link against googletest and we have already put together a minimalist "mock" arduino core for native compilation.

Forking: We'd like to avoid forking arduino-cli due to the maintenance cost of keeping it up to date. We'd be happy to do the development - it should be a relatively simple change to make, could even be a flag passed to the existing compile command. We think this would be helpful to the community as well since it provides greater flexibility, so we're hoping you would be willing to take on maintenance of this feature.

We'd love to hear your thoughts on this!