Suppose I have a third party library called somelib.a on a Mac running Mountain Lion with Xcode 4.4 installed. I want to get a dynamic library out of it called somelib.dylib. An appropriate Linux command would be:
g++ -fpic -shared -Wl,-whole-archive somelib.a -Wl,-no-whole-archive -o somelib.so
where -whole-archive and -no-whole-archive are passed to the linker.
When I do the equivalent for Mac:
g++ -fpic -shared -Wl,-whole-archive somelib.a -Wl,-no-whole-archive -o somelib.dylib
ld fails with an error:
ld: unknown option: -whole-archive
It seems that the ld on OSX is different from GNU ld. How do I have to modify above command so I will get the desired result?
Thank you in advance!
I found out the solution to my problem:
g++ -fpic -shared -Wl,-all_load somelib.a -Wl,-noall_load -o somelib.dylib
The required arguments are -all_load and -noall_load.
Note: A link for the documentation of the OSX ld linker.
http://www.unix.com/man-page/osx/1/ld/
I know it is late to give an answer for this, but I do not have enough reputation to make a comment on @hanslovsky answer.
However, it helps me a lot to have the docs of the options too.
It helps what the options do exactly, and that other options the ld linker also has.
So I just wanted to share with others who finds linking an issue.
UPDATE:
After the comment from @GhostCat I have decided to expand my answer.
The docs for -all_load is:
-all_load
Loads all members of static archive libraries.
So it loads for all static libraries that you note.
If you want something similar to --whole-archive and --no-whole-archive, then you need to use -force_load and -noall_load.
-force_load "path_to_archive"
Loads all members of the specified static archive library. Note: -
all_load forces all members of all archives to be loaded.
This option allows you to target a specific archive.
-noall_load
This is the default. This option is obsolete.
Then you can define which libraries to fully load with -force_load and then later turn it off again with -noall_load.
According to the ld manual, -noall_load is the default and is ignored. (If you use it, you get an error message: ld: warning: option -noall_load is obsolete and being ignored)
Apparently the way to get -all_load to apply to only one library is as follows:
-Wl,-force_load,somelib.a
