Re: Problem with static linking

[Ian Lance Taylor <iant at google dot com>]

Zachary Turner <divisortheory@gmail.com> writes:

> Thanks for your response despite the fact that I apparently posted to
> the wrong list.  However, one thing still bothers me.  In particular
> that an out-of-the-box installation of gcc appears to produce bogus
> executables on gnu linux and neither the documentation, the compiler,
> nor the linker issue any kind of warnings stating that this might
> happen (or has already happened). In other words, the -static linker
> option, at least under its current implementation, appears to be
> *incompatible* with g++ (and for that matter, gcc as well) on gnu
> linux.  The documentation does state that the -static option behaves
> differently depending on whether or not it's supported by the
> platform.  It seems to be unsupported on this platform, so shouldn't
> it simply either report an error that this option is unavailable, or
> produce an executable that is "as static as possible" but at least
> works?
>
> For example,
>
>> g++ -v -static test.cpp -o test
>
> produces an unusable executable.
>
> g++ -v test.cpp -o test -nodefaultlibs -Wl,-Bstatic -lstdc++ -lm -lgcc
> -lgcc_eh -Wl,-Bdynamic -lc
>
> seems to work correctly (I haven't tested it in our large codebase
> yet, just a simple program that throws and catches an exception in
> main).  Since the first command line can apparently *never* produce
> correct results, could it be changed to have the same behavior as the
> second command line on gnu-linux?

When I try -static with g++ on a hello, world program on GNU/Linux, the
resulting program does work, in that it prints hello, world.  I haven't
tried running valgrind on it.  If you find that -static gives you a
completely unusable executable--one that doesn't work at all--then
something may be wrong.  I tried gcc 4.3.2 on Fedora Core 10 using glibc
2.9.3.

Given that -static does work with simple executables, and given that the
gcc driver does hardly anything with -static other than pass it to the
linker, I think that gcc is behaving reasonably.  It would be annoying
for it to give an error.

Ian