Make a fully statically linked .exe

[msink]

As you say in "Design rationale for the Wrap dependency system" - in windows most proramms are statically linked into one binary. So this should be а goal of this project.

But I don't see any portable way for this.

In mingw I can manually add "-static" to link_args, and it works. In msvc this required /MT runtime instead if /MD, but I don't see this option at all.

[nirbheek]

Do you want to switch the runtime on a per-target basis or on a per-project basis?

[msink]

In most cases per-project. Just want everything linked in one binary, without dependencies on non-default .dll-s

[nirbheek]

There is more fixing that needs to be done to make this work in all cases, for instance an option to prefer static libraries over shared libraries while searching for them with cc.find_library, but I think we can implement part of this by adding a new option called default_runtime with shared and static.

This is also relevant on desktop Linux and on embedded Linux if you want to use your own C++ STL. This is also necessary on iOS since it only allows static executables.

We need to also explore other options for implementing this by looking at the various use-cases that people will have.

[jpakkane]

In the mean time you can manually set buildtype to plain and add /MT yourself to compiler args.

[msink]

In the mean time I can just use mingw with -static flag :)

As of embedded linuxes - they usually use variants of gcc and maybe clang The only weird thing I saw was SHARED FLAT library format - https://blackfin.uclinux.org/doku.php?id=toolchain:creating_libraries "Each FLAT shared library needs to have a unique ID associated with it, and making sure each ID is unique is a task left up to the end user (where the end user is you)."

But AFAIK nowadays it is not widely used - we in production use FDPIC ELF, and there is no visual differences from desktop linuxes.

[RoyiAvital]

It would be great to have a flag specifically for /MT and /MD on Windows.

[jpakkane]

It would be great to have a flag specifically for /MT and /MD on Windows.

We have one now, it is called b_vscrt.

[Hi-Angel]

As a partial solution there're --default-library=static and --prefer-static options. Perhaps the only gotcha is that it doesn't force static build, i.e. build won't fail if there's no certain static version of a library.