Re: Static linking with Mingw and dune

Good to know, thank you for the suggestions!

However, I’m afraid that hacking the compiler and tool chain for this purpose is not an option — that would require everybody else who wants to build the project to do the same, which is infeasible.

It’s a bit disappointing that there seems to be no easy solution for this problem. I would expect it to be a common pain point for folks using OCaml 5 to develop and publish application binaries for Windows. Or am I just alien?

Cheers,
/Andreas


> On 2. Dec 2024, at 09:25, Antonin Décimo <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
>> Regarding OCaml 5.3/mingw64 you shouldn't need to have to do anything with libwinpthreads because it's only used for the msvc port, not the mingw one.
> 
> That is not quite exact, winpthreads is used with mingw-w64, but found
> in the system installation, and linked to. It is vendored for the MSVC
> port and we *statically* link into the runtime only the parts we're
> interested in.
> 
> To statically link with winpthreads, I suggest you do all of it manually:
> - clone winpthreads sources at https://github.com/mingw-w64/mingw-w64,
> go to mingw-w64-libraries/winpthreads, and build a static version of
> the library with your preferred toolchain;
> 
> - hack the OCaml compiler / Makefile to *not* use `-lpthreads`:
>  https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/blob/5a5eb481c7a9d0f039e3169aa8ed19c9b926e982/configure.ac#L2372-L2373
>  Maybe it's just sufficient to set PTHREAD_LIBS when invoking
> configure; however seeing this line makes me think that winpthreads is
> already statically linked with the runtime.
> 
>     PTHREAD_LIBS="-l:libpthread.a $link_gcc_eh"]
> 
>  Haven't dug further.
> 
> -- Antonin