Telling gcc directly to link a library statically

It feels strange to me to use -Wl,-Bstatic in order to tell gcc which libraries I want to link with statically. After all I'm telling gcc directly all other information about linking with libraries (-Ldir, -llibname).

Is it possible to tell the gcc driver directly which libraries should be linked statically?

Clarification: I know that if a certain library exists only in static versions it'll use it without -Wl,-Bstatic, but I want to imply gcc to prefer the static library. I also know that specifying the library file directly would link with it, but I prefer to keep the semantic for including static and dynamic libraries the same.

Solution 1:

Use -l: instead of -l. For example -l:libXYZ.a to link with libXYZ.a. Notice the lib and .a are written out, as opposed to -lXYZ which would auto-expand to libXYZ.so/libXYZ.a.

It is an option of the GNU ld linker:

-l namespec ... If namespec is of the form :filename, ld will search the library path for a file called filename, otherwise it will search the library path for a file called libnamespec.a. ... on ELF ... systems, ld will search a directory for a library called libnamespec.so before searching for one called libnamespec.a. ... Note that this behavior does not apply to :filename, which always specifies a file called filename."

(Since binutils 2.18)

Note that this only works with the GNU linker. If your ld isn't the GNU one you're out of luck.

Solution 2:

You can add .a file in the linking command:

  gcc yourfiles /path/to/library/libLIBRARY.a

But this is not talking with gcc driver, but with ld linker as options like -Wl,anything are.

When you tell gcc or ld -Ldir -lLIBRARY, linker will check both static and dynamic versions of library (you can see a process with -Wl,--verbose). To change order of library types checked you can use -Wl,-Bstatic and -Wl,-Bdynamic. Here is a man page of gnu LD: http://linux.die.net/man/1/ld

To link your program with lib1, lib3 dynamically and lib2 statically, use such gcc call:

gcc program.o -llib1 -Wl,-Bstatic -llib2 -Wl,-Bdynamic -llib3

Assuming that default setting of ld is to use dynamic libraries (it is on Linux).