How to statically link to TBB?

Question

How can I statically link the intel\'s TBB libraries to my application? I know all the caveats such as unfair load distribution of the scheduler, but I don\'t need the sched

Answer 1

Although not officially endorsed by the TBB team, it is possible to build your own statically linked version of TBB with make extra_inc=big_iron.inc.

I have not tested it on Windows or MacOS, but on Linux, it worked (source):

wget https://github.com/01org/tbb/archive/2017_U6.tar.gz
tar xzfv 2017_U6.tar.gz
cd tbb-2017_U6
make extra_inc=big_iron.inc

The generated files are in tbb-2017_U6/build/linux*release.

When you link your application to the static TBB version:

• Call g++ with the -static switch
• Link against tbb (-ltbb) and pthread (-lpthread)

In my test, I also needed to explicitely reference all .o files from the manually build TBB version. Depending on your project, you might also need to pass -pthread to gcc.

I have created a toy example to document all the steps in this Github repository:

• tbb-static-linking-tutorial

It also contains test code to make sure that the generated binary is portable on other Linux distributions.