Statically linked libraries

[alshdavid]

Hi all, can you produce static libraries to allow for statically linking libnode within the consumer (libnode.a)?

I'm creating Rust bindings for libnode however I want to vendor a statically linkable libnode within my crate so it doesn't require the dynamic library being manually installed/available on the system by the user.

It's okay for system dependencies that the Nodejs CLI links dynamically to remain dynamic (like openssl) - I don't need them to be statically included as I am essentially trying to recreate the CLI.

I have tried forking this repo and building libnode with the --fully-static --enable-static arguments - but I am not very experienced with static libraries (or C libraries in general) so I haven't had any success.

References

• StackOverflow: How to build nodejs as a shared library from source code
• Github: node/nodejs discussion

[viferga]

@alshdavid I saw your comment here: nodejs/node#51790 (comment)

I think you don't realize how painful is to embed node, even for simple cases. I would recommend you to use metacall instead, again, because we have solved so many issues you will encounter eventually when embedding nodejs.

If you require to build metacall completely statically, we can provide that for you, it's not a big deal, but you must think about the drawbacks this has.

Also, respect to this:

It's okay for system dependencies that the Nodejs CLI links dynamically to remain dynamic (like openssl) - I don't need them to be statically included as I am essentially trying to recreate the CLI.

It defeats the whole purpose of having libnode compiled statically for your case. So you really need libnode.a compiled statically completely, which is around 40mb or so.

Also if you fork libnode from metacall, I would suggest to do it in the proper way so we can also benefit from improvements or patches.

You can check our current API: https://crates.io/crates/metacall

You can generate a package statically compiled for rust and node only and the size will be very similar to having libnode alone, and the pain will be much less in my opinion.

[viferga]

@alshdavid You can find me here if you want to keep talking about the topic: https://github.com/metacall#-join-our-community-