CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c++cudalinkerstatic-libraries
JulCode
JulCode

Reputation: 21

Static linking third party libraries together with my C++ wrapper code

I am working on a little project to understand the chain of compiler and linker better.

Suppose that i have the libraries libfoo.a and libbar.a. I want to create a library libmy.a, that acts like a wrapper or top level API to both libraries. The target is, that only libmy.a should be required to build an executable, that uses my defined wrapper functions. I created a cmake project and set up the library

cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 3.14)
project(Wrapper)

set(CMAKE_CXX_STANDARD 11)


add_library(my STATIC ${SOME_SRC_FILES})

#set up the lib/inc paths and libs to link
target_include_directories(my PUBLIC /path/to/Foo/inc/ /path/to/Bar/inc/)
target_link_directories(my PUBLIC /path/to/Foo/lib/ /path/to/Bar/lib)
target_link_libraries(my PUBLIC foo bar)

That works fine and there is no problem in compilation. However, if I try to reference the object from an external project, it tells me, that I have undefined references to the functions in libfoo.a and libbar.a. As far as I understand the problem, the linker only creates a declaration in the libmy.a, without including its definition from the external library. I checked this by opening libmy.a with the nm libmy.a command, where the used functions of the external libraries are declared, but undefined.

I came across one solution that used ar to combine multiple library files. However I would like to avoid such methods, because if it is not a single library, but a bunch of, say 10 libraries, it is not suitable to search each library for a definition and copy it into libmy.a. Just throwing all libraries together isn't a solution either, because the file will get too big.

Is it importand to note, that one of these library packages is CUDA?

I am sure there is a solution, but I was not able to find one. Any help would be appreciated

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1359

Answers (1)

Romen
Romen

Reputation: 1766

The target is, that only libmy.a should be required to build an executable

This is already an unconventional goal for static libraries.

Static libraries normally only contain the object code built from the source code for that library. Users of that library must also link to the libraries that your library requires, because the definitions have not been copied in to your library when it was built.

Tools like ar can be used to combine multiple static libraries together, since they are just archives of object code. The tool can not predict which object code the end-user will use though, so it will bundle entire libraries. Otherwise, the end user may be looking for a definition that you left out and then need to link in a 2nd copy of the dependency lib anyways.

If you want to provide a library that has everything the end-user needs, cut down to what your wrapper actually uses, you can build a shared library. Shared libraries are considered executable, so the compiler knows that any unreferenced object code is not going to be used, and it will not be included in the shared library.

You can force the entire static libraries to be included in shared libraries though.
On GCC you can use the linker argument: --whole-archive to ensure that all of the object code from the following libraries is included.
On MSVC, you can use the /WHOLEARCHIVE:<library file name> argument to do the same.

Upvotes: 1

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