Building static stand alone library with gprbuild

Question

I am trying to build a static library using gprbuild. The library does not have a main (which is written in C and linked in later stage) and must be self contained as far as I understand the gpr term for this is "stand-alone" which means, it will not be required to link with anything including the runtime during it's run-time.

My gpr looks like this

project Ada_Foo_Lib is

   for Source_Dirs use ("src");
   for Object_Dir   use "obj";
   for Library_Dir  use "lib"; 
   for Library_Name use "ada_foo_lib";
   for Library_Kind use "static";

   package Binder is
      for Default_Switches("Ada") use ("-n");
      for Required_Switches ("Ada") use ("-n");
   end Binder;

end Ada_Foo_Lib;

When I run gprbuild, I see in the log that does not include a call to the binder:

gnatmake -Pada_foo_lib.gpr --create-missing-dirs
gcc-4.9 -c -I- -gnatA /home/temp/src/ada_foo_pack.adb

building static library for project ada_foo_lib
ar cr /home/temp/lib/libada_foo_lib.a /home/temp/obj/ada_foo_pack.o
ranlib /home/temp/lib/libada_foo_lib.a

My problem is that resulting libada_foo_lib.a does not have adainit and adafinal exported. I tried to link it and also verified with an objdump.

I tried all kinds of combinations of switches but nothing made the binder to be called, unless I changed to Library_Kind to dynamic and use Library_Standalone:

Would it be possible to add a stub "main" to force `adainit` and `adafinal` to be linked in, but never call it? — , Oct 14 '16 at 22:19

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 14 '16 at 21:00

If your library didn’t need to be static, but just to be self-contained (i.e. to include the necessary parts of the Ada runtime within itself), you could say

for Library_Kind use "dynamic";
for Library_Interface use ("One_Of_Your_Units");
for Library_Standalone use "encapsulated";

(you have to have a Library_Interface, but I don’t think it has to include all the units that export C-visible symbols).

Unfortunately, as you noted, this doesn’t work for static libraries.

Building static stand alone library with gprbuild

1 Answers1