Mixed static and dynamic link on Mac OS

Question

I want to use gcc to produce a shared library, but i want to link some other libraries it depends on statically. Now to produce the \"standard\" dynamically linked output fi

Answer 1

Quoting QA1393,

Normally, the linker goes through each path in the search paths one at a time to find a dynamic version of the library. If none is found, it goes through each of those paths looking for a static version of the same library. There is no way to choose a static library over a corresponding dylib if both libraries are in the same directory without using the -l linker option and absolute paths to each library.

As recommended by QA1393, you can place your static libraries in a different directory, use -L/path/to/static/libraries before other occurrences of -L that could point to dynamic libraries, and -search_paths_first so that the linker tries both .dylib (which won’t be there) and .a in the first search path before searching the next search path and so forth.

Answer 2

I ran into the same problem. As it turned out, there seems to be no way to link libraries statically without specifying the full path to the .a-file.

However, there seems to be neat trick in Makefile's allowing for smooth usage.

vpath %.a /opt/local/lib
.LIBPATTERNS lib%.a lib%.dylib lib%.so

STATICLIBS = -lssh2

libmy.dylib: my1.o my2.o $(STATICLIBS)
  g++ -dynamiclib -o libmy.dylib $^

Note how the $(STATICLIBS) variable is put in the dependencies. Make will not treat dependecies with an '-l' prefix as files - but rather as libraries. Using the above vpath magic make looks up the libraries and put the full path on the commandline to g++.