Compile Static Library Mac

Sep 09, 2011  I have a compiler which produces assembly code. Life is much easier to just produce one -static version for memory access than support one for each ABI, since the static is the same. I am attempting to port from Linux, and I am Mac below. I am searching way to compile static library for Windows in Linux or Macos, there seems to be cross compiler to generate.a library for Windows like this one, but that is not what I want, what I want is a.lib static library file for Windows, preferably for Visual Studio.I know I can run a Windows virtual machine and using Visual Studio, but that is too heavy, and can't be done in command line.

Our compiler understands how to index into archive files and pull out the functions it needs to combine into the final executable. If we use a static library to statically link all functions required, we can have one binary with no dependencies. Sep 02, 2013  This is the basic linker which usually runs behind the scene when you run gcc. In Mac OS X, the linker ld is use with dyld, gcc is the symbolic link to llvm-gcc. Library Display Tools To display the contents of the static library, we use ar, otool or nm.

  • Concepts

Shows a hello world example which first creates and links a static library. This is asimplified example showing the library and binary in the same folder. Typicallythese would be in sub-projects as described in section 02-sub-projects

  • CMakeLists.txt - Contains the CMake commands you wish to run

  • include/static/Hello.h - The header file to include

  • src/Hello.cpp - A source file to compile

  • src/main.cpp - The source file with main

Adding a Static Library

The add_library() function is used to create a library from some source files.This is called as follows:

This will be used to create a static library with the name libhello_library.a withthe sources in the add_library call.

As mentioned in the previous example, we pass the source files directly to theadd_library call, as recommended for modern CMake.

Populating Including Directories

Compile Static Library Gcc

In this example, we include directories in the library using the target_include_directories() function with the scope set to PUBLIC.

This will cause the included directory used in the following places:

  • When compiling the library

  • When compiling any additional target that links the library.

  • PRIVATE - the directory is added to this target’s include directories

  • INTERFACE - the directory is added to the include directories for any targets that link this library.

  • PUBLIC - As above, it is included in this library and also any targets that link this library.

For public headers it is often a good idea to have your include folder be 'namespaced'with sub-directories.

The directory passed to target_include_directories will be the root of yourinclude directory tree and your C++ files should include the path from there to your header.

For this example you can see that we do it as follows:

Using this method means that there is less chance of header filename clashes whenyou use multiple libraries in your project.

Linking a Library

When creating an executable that will use your library you must tell the compilerabout the library. This can be done using the target_link_library() function.

This tells CMake to link the hello_library against the hello_binary executableduring link time. It will also propagate any include directories with PUBLIC or INTERFACE scope from the linked library target.

An example of this being called by the compiler is

by Angel Leon. March 17, 2015; August 29, 2019.

Include Paths

On the compilation phase, you will usually need to specify the different include paths so that the interfaces (.h, .hpp) which define structs, classes, constans, and functions can be found.

With gcc and llvm include paths are passed with -I/path/to/includes, you can pass as many -I as you need.

In Windows, cl.exe takes include paths with the following syntax:/I'c:pathtoincludes you can also pass as many as you need.

Some software uses macro definition variables that should be passed during compile time to decide what code to include.

Compilation flags

These compilation-time variables are passed using -D,e.g. -DMYSOFTWARE_COMPILATION_VARIABLE-DDO_SOMETHING=1-DDISABLE_DEPRECATED_FUNCTIONS=0

These compilation time flags are by convention usually put into a single variable named CXXFLAGS, which is then passed to the compiler as a parameter for convenience when you're building your compilation/make script.

Object files

When you compile your .c, or .cpp files, you will end up with object files.These files usually have .o extensions in Linux, in Windows they might be under .obj extensions.

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You can create an .o file for a single or for many source files.

Static Library files

When you have several .o files, you can put them together as a library, a static library. In Linux/Mac these static libraries are simply archive files, or .a files. In windows, static library files exist under the .lib extension.

They are created like this in Linux/Mac:

ar -cvq libctest.a ctest1.o ctest2.o ctest3.o

libctest.a will contain ctest1.o,ctest2.o and ctest2.o

They are created like this in Windows:

Gcc Compile To Static Library

LIB.EXE /OUT:MYLIB.LIB FILE1.OBJ FILE2.OBJ FILE3.OBJ

When you are creating an executable that needs to make use of a library, if you use these static libraries, the size of your executable will be the sum of all the object files statically linked by the executable. The code is right there along the executable, it's easier to distribute, but again, the size of the executable can be bigger than it needs to.. why? because, sometimes, many of the .o files, or even the entire .a file you're linking against might be a standard library that many other programs need.

Shared Libraries (Dynamic Libraries)

So shared or dynamic libraries were invented so that different programs or libraries would make external (shared) references to them, since they're 'shared' the symbols defined in them don't need to be part of your executable or library, your executable contain symbols whose entry points or offset addresses might point to somewhere within themselves, but they will also have symbols whose entry points are expected to exist on shared libraries which need only be loaded once in a single portion of the operating shared memory, thus not just making the size of your executable as small as it needs to be, but you won't need to load the library for every process/program that needs its symbols.

On Linux shared files exist under the .so (shared object) file extension, on Mac .dylib (dynamic library), and in Windows they're called .dll (dynamic link libraries)

Another cool thing about dynamic libraries, is that they can be loaded during runtime, not just linked at compile time. An example of runtime dynamic libraries are browser plugins.

In Linux .so files are created like this:

  • -Wall enables all warnings.
  • -c means compile only, don't run the linker.
  • -fPIC means 'Position Independent Code', a requirement for shared libraries in Linux.
  • -shared makes the object file created shareable by different executables.
  • -Wl passes a comma separated list of arguments to the linker.
  • -soname means 'shared object name' to use.
  • -o <my.so> means output, in this case the output shared library

In Mac .dylib files are created like this:

clang -dynamiclib -o libtest.dylib file1.o file2.o -L/some/library/path -lname_of_library_without_lib_prefix

In Windows .dll files are created like this:

LINK.EXE /DLL /OUT:MYLIB.DLL FILE1.OBJ FILE2.OBJ FILE3OBJ

Linking to existing libraries

When linking your software you may be faced with a situation on which you want to link against several standard shared libraries.If all the libraries you need exist in a single folder, you can set the LD_LIBRARY_PATH to that folder. By common standard all shared libraries are prefixed with the word lib. If a library exists in LD_LIBRARY_PATH and you want to link against it, you don't need to pass the entire path to the library, you simply pass -lname and you will link your executable to the symbols of libname.so which should be somewhere inside LD_LIBRARY_PATH.

Tip: You should probably stay away from altering your LD_LIBRARY_PATH, if you do, make sure you keep its original value, and when you're done restore it, as you might screw the build processes of other software in the system which might depend on what's on the LD_LIBRARY_PATH.

What if libraries are in different folders?

If you have some other libbar.so library on another folder outside LD_LIBRARY_PATH you can explictly pass the full path to that library /path/to/that/other/library/libbar.so, or you can specify the folder that contains it -L/path/to/that/other/library and then the short hand form -lbar. This latter option makes more sense if the second folder contains several other libraries.

Useful tools

Sometimes you may be dealing with issues like undefined symbol errors, and you may want to inspect what symbols (functions) are defined in your library.

On Mac there's otool, on Linux/Mac there's nm, on Windows there's depends.exe (a GUI tool that can be used to see both dependencies and the symbol's tables. Taking a look at the 'Entry Point' column will help you understand clearly the difference between symbols linking to a shared library vs symbols linking statically to the same library)

Useful command options

See shared library dependencies on Mac with otool

See shared symbols with nm (Linux/Mac)With nm, you can see the symbol's name list.Familiarize yourself with the meaning of the symbol types:

  • T (text section symbol)
  • U (undefined - useful for those undefined symbol error),
  • I (indirect symbol).

If the symbol is local (non-external) the symbol type is presented in lowercase letters, for example a lowercase u represents an undefined reference to a private external in another module in the same library.

nm's documentation says that if you're working on Mac and you see that the symbol is preceeded by + or - it means it's an ObjectiveC method, if you're familiar with ObjectiveC you will know that + is for class methods and - is for instance methods, but in practice it seems to be a bit more explicit and you will often see objc or OBJC prefixed to those methods.

nm is best used along with grep ;)

Find all Undefined symbols

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My C++ code compiles but it won't link

Linking is simply 'linking' a bunch of .o files to make an executable.

Each one of these .o's may be compiled on their own out of their .cpp files, but when one references symbols that are supposed to exist in other .o's and they're not to be found then you get linking errors.

Perhaps through forward declarations you managed your compilation phase to pass, but then you get a bunch of symbol not found errors.Make sure to read them slowly, see where these symbols are being referenced, you will see that these issues occur due to namespace visibility in most cases.

Perhaps you copied the signature of a method that exists in a private space elsewhere into some other namespace where your code wasn't compiling, all you did was make it compilable, but the actual symbol might not be visible outside the scope where it's truly defined and implemented.

Function symbols can be private if they're declared inside anonymous namespaces, or if they're declared as static functions.

An example:

Here, when I read the code of Network::TxMessage::handle(..) there was a call to FlushStateToDisk, which was declared in main.h, and coded in main.cpp. My TxMessage.cpp did include main.h, compilation was fine, I had a TxMessage.o file and a main.o, but the linker was complaining.

The issue was that FlushStateToDisk was declared as a static, therefore only visible inside main.o, once I removed the static from the declaration and implementation the error went away and my executable was linked. Similar things happen when functions are declared in anonymous spaces in other files, even if you forward declare them on your local .h

In other cases your code compiles and you get this error linking because your library can't be added using -lfoo, and adding its containing folder to -L doesn't cut it, in this case you just add the full path to the library in your compilation command: gcc /path/to/the/missing/library.o .. my_source.cpp -o my_executable

Reminder:

DO NOT EXPORT CFLAGS, CPPFLAGS and the like on your .bash_profile/.bashrc, it can lead to unintended building consequences in many projects. I've wasted so many hours due to this mistake.