Create a static Haskell Linux executable

Question

It\'s not often two things I love so much come together to cause me so much annoyance (besides my kids). I\'ve written a Haskell program at work that uses libraries like tex

Answer 1

This simple example "works for me":

$ cat A.hs
main = print "yes"

$ ghc -O2 --make -static -optc-static -optl-static A.hs -fvia-C -optl-pthread

$ ldd A
    not a dynamic executable
$ ./A
"yes"

(and I've used this process, via .cabal, to ship executables for clients in the past couple of years).

I think the best bet is to file bugs, and get this working. The IHG can also fund work like this, but I'm fairly sure the GHC team would consider this a high priority, if you're trying to ship products.

Answer 2

It is related to the old glibc library in CentOS. You have to compile with the same version of glibc as installed on CentOS.

I had exactly the same problem. Haskell executable compiled on arch (or ubuntu) won't run on CentOS. In my case though i was lucky, because our admin just removed CentOS and installed Arch for application server.

Answer 3

I found out the problem. It seems that the link to the Biohaskell page is accurate: this is a problem loading iconv. This occurs when calling openFile, but not when calling openBinaryFile. Since xml-enumerator uses the latter, it worked just fine. Switching over the rest of the code to use openBinaryFile instead (via Data.Enumerator.Binary.enumFile) got everything to work.

This is a good workaround for my use case, but the bug still exists.