Ask HN: What's stopping Guix from building static binaries for various targets?

8•tetris11•5mo ago

Guix can build for various different targets using `guix build --target <arch>`, and it can build entire linked libraries that can be deployed as a tarball to a target machine via `guix pack --target <arch>`...

But it can't do the one thing that Nix can do reliably and that is produce a single static binary.

What is stopping it?

Many packages are written using the `(build-system gnu-build-system)` macro.

How hard is it to add a `(build-system gnu-build-system 'static)` parameter, that changes the configure step to use the `-static` flag?

Comments

revskill•5mo ago

Fear.

gkoos•5mo ago

In Guix, packages are typically dynamically linked against libraries in the store. Static linking changes not just the configure flags, but also how dependencies are pulled in - you'd have to make sure every dependency is available as a static .a library for the target platform and many Guix packages aren't built with static artifacts at all.

tetris11•5mo ago

So I can understand needing to modify the build flags for all dependencies to generate static artefacts for the final binary, and regenerating these from scratch... but still, isn't that just a single extra parameter in their compile args?

What if you just did a startup instead?

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