static libraries

Alexey Pushkin alexey.pushkin at mererand.com
Fri Feb 20 15:13:28 UTC 2009


Hi,

why don't many mingw32-xxx packages provide static (non-dll) versions of libraries ?
For example no libz.a in mingw32-zlib. No libxerces-c.a in mingw32-xerces.

Static linking makes a lot of sense with mingw.

Unlike MSVC, Mingw (by default) links in msvcrt.dll which is *always*
present in any Windows installation.
Besides, Mingw *always* linkes in *static* libstdc++.a and libgcc.a.

Therefore mingw-compiled executables generally have no dll dependenices,
which is quite convenient.

Moreover, .dlls usually don't make much sense with Mingw:
when I distribute my mingw-compiled application, the chances
that a user has another mingw-compiled application are quite
small which defeats the purpose of using dynamic linking,
static linking is usually more appropriate.

But Mingw's no-dll-dependenices behavior is broken by the fact
that mingw-* packages provide only dll versions of the libraries :-(

And it's simply strange to have huge libstdc++.a
statically linked into an executable and at the same time
depend on tiny little libz1.dll

BTW: Although static linking is rarely used in Linux,
all *-devel Linux packages still have static versions of libraries...





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