Re: Static compiling of Gtk 3 applications

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

Hi;

static linking is generally discouraged by the GTK developers, and
it's definitely an untested build configuration; while we do have
continuous integration for all the maintained GTK branches (gtk-2-24,
gtk-3-22, and master), we never test a static build of the stack, so
it's not guaranteed to work at any point. Additionally, given that GTK
and its dependencies rely on various dynamically loaded modules,
there's really little point in statically compiling GTK and its
dependencies. The additional licensing requirements also make
complying with the terms of the LGPL harder for you, when it comes to
static linking. Finally, on Linux, static linking is going to waste
more resources than dynamic linking ever will.

Building GTK under WebAssembly and using Broadway is a completely
untested scenario, so you're essentially on your own. I think we'd be
amenable to patches to allow this to happen, but we are not really
going to keep them working, as we don't have any available CI
infrastructure to test that.

Having said that, we're looking into improving the static builds at
least for GLib, as it's useful for some platforms — like Android — and
the GStreamer developers have CI infrastructure for it. It would not
apply to GTK, though.

Ciao,
 Emmanuele.


On 26 January 2018 at 18:00, Olivier Berger
<olivier berger telecom-sudparis eu> wrote:
> Hi.
>
> Would there be a rather recent reference documentation about the static
> compilation of Gtk 3 applications on Linux ?
>
> There are a few hints at sometimes undocumented "SDK" to download, or
> quite old resources, but I couldn't find anything for recent Gtk 3
> version.
>
> My reference would be versions of Debian stable packages, and what's
> necessary for building and linking only minimal dependencies needed for
> the broadway gdk backend.
>
> It seems https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-list/2005-May/msg00046.html
> gives some hints, but I imagine dependencies have evolved a bit since 13
> years ago ;-)
>
> Ultimately we're trying to assess the feasability to port a Gtk app to
> WebAssembly (hence the static compilation for an emscripten/wasm
> toolchain, and using broadwayd for the display).
>
> Many thanks in advance.
>
> Best regards,
> --
> Olivier BERGER
> http://www-public.telecom-sudparis.eu/~berger_o/ - OpenPGP-Id: 2048R/5819D7E8
> Ingenieur Recherche - Dept INF
> Institut Mines-Telecom, Telecom SudParis, Evry (France)
>
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