Re: [Caml-list] Static linking with Mingw and dune

[Andreas Rossberg <rossberg@mpi-sws.org>]

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 <antonin.decimo@gmail.com> 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