Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

"J. Lewis Muir" <[email protected]> · Thu, 21 Jul 2011 14:06:34 -0500

On 7/21/11 1:25 PM, David Dudley wrote:
> I seem to have discovered a problem on a MAC darwin-x86 where I can¹t static
> link programs.
> 
> Whenever I try to set STATIC_BUILD=YES in the CONFIG_SITE file, and do a
> clean rebuild, it fails when it¹s trying to link antelope, saying that it
> can¹t find the crt0.0 library.
> 
> 
> Did I delete a file I shouldn¹t have, or is this something that darwin-x86
> doesn¹t support?

Hi, David.

Mac OS X doesn't support statically linking binaries.  Well,
technically it does, but it's difficult because you would need a
static version of libSystem.dylib and crt0.o, neither of which
are provided.  This is according to the Mac OS X 10.6.8 gcc man
page section for the '-static' option which says:

  On systems that support dynamic linking, this prevents linking
  with the shared libraries.  On other systems, this option has
  no effect.

  This option will not work on Mac OS X unless all libraries
  (including libgcc.a) have also been compiled with -static.
  Since neither a static version of libSystem.dylib nor crt0.o
  are provided, this option is not useful to most people.

This used to be stated in the Mac OS X Technical Q&A, but it is
now only listed in the legacy Technical Q&A at:

http://developer.apple.com/legacy/mac/library/#qa/qa2001/qa1118.html

So, basically, you can build static libraries, but not static
binaries.  You can build mostly static binaries, but they will
still be partly dynamic binaries in that they require
libSystem.dylib or crt0.o or whatever.  But since the binary is
for a Mac, that should be OK.

Lewis

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System