Question

I am in the process of making a basic role-playing game. I want to include the Boost libraries statically so that the people who run my game do not need to have them. I researched and looked-up that all you have to do is add -static to the command-line compile, so my command is like this:

$ g++ -static -o karthas *.o -lncurses -lmenu -lboost_system -lboost_filesystem

But apparently the -static is affecting ncurses. I am getting a whole bunch of errors, most of which are undefined reference to ‘SP’.

Is it possible to just do a static link to Boost and not ncurses? How would I go about doing that?

Answer 1

You can choose which libraries will be linked statically and which will be linked dynamically by putting either -Wl,-static or -Wl,-Bdynamic before their name.

For example, with:

g++  -o karthas *.o -Wl,-static -lmenu -lboost_system -lboost_filesystem -Wl,-Bdynamic -lncurses 

The menu, boost_system and boost_filesystem libraries will be linked statically and ncurses dynamically.

(But you can also distribute the boost dlls with your executable, and not link anything statically).