While I also like static binaries, most people do not necessarily need or want them -- changing the default for GHC to be built with musl would be a huge risk, IMO. More concretely, while GHC has a maintained alpine linux package (which is based on musl), stack does not -- see https://github.com/commercialhaskell/stack/issues/2387.

I've written about it a little bit (https://vadosware.io/post/static-binaries-for-haskell-a-convoluted-approach/), the post is quite old so things have likely shifted.

Static linking for programs in linux is surprisingly hard (but possible with some caveats), even when you get a library linked with musl (or some other small libc) you often need to ensure that libnss is available if you're going to do dns resolutions. One alternative that looks viable is nsss (https://skarnet.org/software/nsss), but I've never actually used it -- other languages like rust and go get around this by offering domain name resolution at the language level (https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/net/trait.ToSocketAddrs.html, https://golang.org/pkg/net/#hdr-Name_Resolution). I'm not entirely sure how easy this would be to do with haskell -- is the move to make a haskell binding to nsss then using that? How easy is it to write a haskell library that will include the relevant headers that make nsss go? Here's the quick rundown on how one uses nsss:

> Application programs can use the internal API directly, or the prefixed nsss_ functions directly. Most programs, however, will simply use the standard pwd.h, grp.h or shadow.h interfaces. nsss provides a version of these standard headers: if an application is built with these headers, then getpwnam() will automatically be aliased to nsss_all_getpwnam(), and the other functions will be aliased similarly.

Also, a cabal-based workflow might be better for building static haskell binaries -- it's normally included with containers that have the toolchain set up already like https://github.com/utdemir/ghc-musl (but as I mentioned earlier, stack is not).

I *think* you could somewhat easily get stack to build a musl derived binary by using the stack docker integration (https://docs.haskellstack.org/en/stable/docker_integration/) -- again, I haven't tried this but it'd be a good subject of a blog post at some point.

Victor

On 3/10/20 2:10 PM, Nutr1t07 wrote:

It's pretty weird that program compiled with '-optl-static' runs just well on my server Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS (GNU/Linux 4.15.0-48-generic x86_64), but failed running on my PC Archlinux (x86_64 Linux 5.5.8-arch1-1).

Since there are static compiling problems with glibc, why is the GHC in stack is still built with ghlic instead of musl?

On 3/10/20 11:24 AM, Vanessa McHale wrote:

I’ve run into that before; I think it arises because you can’t link statically against libc? In any case, trying to use network code fails with a segfault.

I think it is hard to work around; you need to build GHC against musl and then use that to compile your program.

Cheers,
Vanessa

On Mar 9, 2020, at 9:32 PM, Nutr1t07 <nutr1t07@outlook.com> wrote:

Hi,

I added '-optl-static' in GHC option to make my program compiled statically. When I compiled the following code using 'stack build':

-- Main.hs

{-# LANGUAGE OverloadedStrings #-}
module Main where

import Web.Scotty                     as Scotty
import Network.Wreq                as Wreq
import Control.Monad.IO.Class

main :: IO ()
main = scotty 8443 $ do
   Scotty.get (literal "/") $ do
     _ <- liftIO $ Wreq.get "https://www.google.com/"
     html "Could not see this"

--

Ran the compiled program and accessing "http://localhost:8443" would raise a segmentation fault.

Here are what in my 'ghc-option':

     ghc-options:
     - -optl-static
     - -threaded
     - -rtsopts
     - -with-rtsopts=-N

Then I removed the '-optl-static', compiled it, and the program ran well.

It seems that it something has to do with glibc. What can I do with this problem?

Regards

PS. I'm using GHC 8.8.2, stack 2.1.3

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