Creating static Mac OS X C build

Question

How can i create a static build of a .c file on Mac OS X ? When i try:

gcc -o test Main.c -static

I get:

ld: library not fo         


        

Answer 1

A binary that has no dynamic loaded libraries can not be built under OSX. I tried both apple llvm-gcc and macports gcc. However what no answer mentioned so far is that this is not needed. You can link the c/c++ library statically (and live with some dynamic part).

File hello.cpp:

#include 
using namespace std; 
int main()
{
    cout << "Hello World!";
}

Compile as usual:

g++ hello.cpp -o hello

Check linkage:

otool -L hello
hello:
/usr/lib/libstdc++.6.dylib (compatibility version 7.0.0, current version 52.0.0)
/usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 159.1.0)

We can not get rid of the libSystem.B.dylib dependency but with macports gcc we can do this:

g++-mp-4.6 -static-libgcc -static-libstdc++ hello.cpp -o hello

otool -L hello
hello:
/usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 159.1.0)

Apparently just Apple does not support static linking:

llvm-g++ -static-libgcc -static-libstdc++ hello.cpp -o hello

otool -L hello
hello:
/usr/lib/libstdc++.6.dylib (compatibility version 7.0.0, current version 52.0.0)
/usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 159.1.0)