1ac1a541
by Julian Ospald at 2026-01-09T02:48:53-05:00
Support statically linking executables properly
Fixes #26434
In detail, this does a number of things:
* Makes GHC aware of 'extra-libraries-static' (this changes the package
database format).
* Adds a switch '-static-external' that will honour 'extra-libraries-static'
to link external system dependencies statically.
* Adds a new field to settings/targets: "ld supports verbatim namespace".
This field is used by '-static-external' to conditionally use '-l:foo.a'
syntax during linking, which is more robust than trying to find the
absolute path to an archive on our own.
* Adds a switch '-fully-static' that is meant as a high-level interface
for e.g. cabal. This also honours 'extra-libraries-static'.
This also attempts to clean up the confusion around library search directories.
At the moment, we have 3 types of directories in the package database
format:
* library-dirs
* library-dirs-static
* dynamic-library-dirs
However, we only have two types of linking: dynamic or static. Given the
existing logic in 'mungeDynLibFields', this patch assumes that
'library-dirs' is really just nothing but a fallback and always
prefers the more specific variants if they exist and are non-empty.
Conceptually, we should be ok with even just one search dirs variant.
Haskell libraries are named differently depending on whether they're
static or dynamic, so GHC can conveniently pick the right one depending
on the linking needs. That means we don't really need to play tricks
with search paths to convince the compiler to do linking as we want it.
For system C libraries, the convention has been anyway to place static and
dynamic libs next to each other, so we need to deal with that issue
anyway and it is outside of our control. But this is out of the scope
of this patch.
This patch is backwards compatible with cabal. Cabal should however
be patched to use the new '-fully-static' switch.