Question

I want to make a stand-alone exe with cygwin. I have two options:

1. Staticly link cygwin1.dll
   If I can statically link cygwin1.dll, then I can get a stand-alone exe.

2. Merge cygwin1.dll with myprog.exe
   If I can merge cygwin1.dll with my program, the I can get a stand-alone exe.

Do not suggest that I use IlMerge. This will not work because I didn’t compile my program with .NET.

Are any of these options possible? If not, is there anything that is possible with this dilemma? Thanx!

Answer 1

I can see two possibilities that you might consider reasonable. One would be to build a stub executable with a different compiler (e.g., MinGW — whatever, just so it doesn’t need cygwin) to unpack the main executable and cygwin.dll into a temporary directory, and then spawn that executable. To distribute only a single executable, you’d want to add the main executable and cygwin.dll to the “stub” as binary resources. It’s a bit ugly, but pretty straightforward.

The alternative would be to grab the source to cygwin, and build it as a static library. At least in theory, this should be cleaner — but it’s also undoubtedly more work. Getting it to build as purely static code instead of a DLL will almost certainly take some work, though it’s hard to even guess how much. Just browsing a bit, it’s seems pretty unlikely that it’s going to be a quick job of a couple hours, or anything like that (unless there’s something there that I missed that already supports building it statically, of course).