How to force gcc to link an unused static library

Question

I have a program and a static library:

// main.cpp
int main() {}

// mylib.cpp
#include <iostream>
struct S {
    S() { std::cout << "Hello World\n";}
};
S s;

I want to link the static library (libmylib.a) to the program object (main.o), although the latter does not use any symbol of the former directly.

The following commands do not seem to the job with g++ 4.7. They will run without any errors or warnings, but apparently libmylib.a will not be linked:

g++ -o program main.o -Wl,--no-as-needed /path/to/libmylib.a

or

g++ -o program main.o -L/path/to/ -Wl,--no-as-needed -lmylib

Do you have any better ideas?

Answer 1

Use --whole-archive linker option.

Libraries that come after it in the command line will not have unreferenced symbols discarded. You can resume normal linking behaviour by adding --no-whole-archive after these libraries.

In your example, the command will be:

g++ -o program main.o -Wl,--whole-archive /path/to/libmylib.a

In general, it will be:

g++ -o program main.o \
    -Wl,--whole-archive -lmylib \
    -Wl,--no-whole-archive -llib1 -llib2