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Comment by yjftsjthsd-h | Hacker News Reader

I know the ability exists, but I'm pretty sure that it's not exactly easy to get it working. Last time I tried, it immediately failed because my distribution wasn't shipping .a files (IIRC) for my installed libraries. There's a lot of little things that don't quite work because nobody's using them so they're harder to use so nobody uses them...

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It's easy to get working provided that you compile _everything_ from source. You can either omit glibc from this, or accept that it will still dynamically load some stuff at runtime even when "statically" linked, or switch to musl. A nice benefit is that LTO can then be applied to the entire program as a whole.

Yep, exactly this. And quirks of glibc and friends make fully static compilation likely to produce odd failures, unfortunately.

Glibc does not really support static linking.

Kind of my point — so much software depends on it, it’s difficult to statically link more things.

Musl is a pretty good replacement, I have been using it for years without any troubles.

I like Musl, but it is a source of pain at times too: https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/64924 https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/33554

Admittedly you could put that on the Kubernetes folks, but the same problem doesn't exist with glibc.

I don't see how zig cc would help with that. Your distribution probably also doesn't ship all the source files for your packages either, and there's no other way to statically link.

Gentoo does.

I've used Gentoo for almost a decade now, and no, that's not true. emerge doesn't just randomly keep source files on disk, and certainly not in a form easy to link to. In fact, Gentoo is worse than Debian for static linking, because not all packages have IUSE=static-libs. If it doesn't, you need to patch that ebuild and potentially many dependencies to support it. On the other hand, on Debian, the standard is for -dev packages to come with both headers and static libraries.

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