Question on statically linking with cygwin

[Johannes Thoma]

Hi,

As I promised some updates below.

Am 02.11.23 um 18:33 schrieb Johannes Thoma via Cygwin:
>>>> [...]
>>>> Interesting.
>>>> But how (from a developers perspective) do you link cygwin1.dll
>>>> statically into a binary?
>>>>
>>> I would build my own cygwin1.lib or cygwin1.a and statically link
>>> against it.
>>
>> If you do work out how to do this, patches would be welcome...
>>
> You are right it is far from trivial. I am working on it, not
> sure now if it will be possible or how long it takes (my main
> project is WinDRBD, so unfortunately I cannot spend full time on
> getting static linking work). Right now, I can compile cygwin on my own
> and digged a little bit in the program startup code (lib subdir),
> I will keep you updated once I go along.
> 

I can link a simple hello world program (which uses write(2) to
produce output to test the POSIX variant) with something like:

LDFLAGS=-L. -lcygwin-static -lcygserver -lntdll -lkernel32 -lc -lg -lm -lgcc -static -nodefaultlibs

and copiing the newlib libc, libm and other libraries from the
build. The ntdll and kernel32 libs are from a mingw-w64 installation.

the cygwin-static library contains every .o file in the winsup/cygwin
build directory except: lib/libcmain.o and ctype.o (for now had to
patch __set_ctype out of cygwin and take the newlib version, maybe
I can fix that somehow).

Right now it links and produces a (22 Megabytes) EXE binary, however
it crashes in the thread_allocator C++ class (most likely because the
matching constructor is not called before that) this will be the
next thing to fix.

Ok have a great weekend everybody and I will get back once I continue
on the static linking feature.

Best regards,

- Johannes