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9401 :: Issues when creating static library on macOS

• vitaliy (orginal) [2022-08-22T16:32:52+02:00] view original

  Hi all!

  I'm building a static library named lightclient on macOS via this command invocation:

  
  nim c --app:staticlib --header:lightclient.h --noMain lightclient.nim
  Run

  During the final stage, when the build process invokes ar tool, i get this error:

  
  Error: execution of an external program failed: 'ar  @lightclient_linkerArgs.txt'
  Run

  Seems that is because Nim compiler by default invokes version of ar from Xcode command line tools, which does not support reading parameters from files. I tried modifying the path for Nim compiler invocation:

  
  PATH=/usr/local/opt/binutils/bin:$PATH nim c ...`
  Run

  which works. However, later on, when i try to link the resulting static library with another executable, i get ld linker errors, complaining that

  
  ld: warning: ignoring file liblightclient.a, building for macOS-x86_64 but attempting to link with file built for macOS-x86_64
  Run

  so i'm at loss now.

  Can someone please shed some light on this? Maybe there is a way to tell Nim to use macOS's default tools without fiddling with the PATH, or some other options?

  Thanks a lot.

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• enthus1ast (orginal) [2022-08-23T10:23:35+02:00] view original

  I would first try to update xcode's toolchain

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• vitaliy (orginal) [2022-08-23T12:04:55+02:00] view original

  Thanks for reply @enthus1ast! I've got the most recent one (Xcode 13.2.1) for my OS version (Big Sur). Cannot upgrade further, as my hardware is not supported on macOS 12+.

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• enthus1ast (orginal) [2022-08-23T12:39:40+02:00] view original

  Then it would be interesting to see what changed between the versions, but I do not really code on macos others might know

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• AIR (orginal) [2022-08-25T05:39:23+02:00] view original

  Are you linking external libraries and if so did you build those or were they provided?

  You may be running into a versioning issue; -mmacosx-version-min flag may be the culprit.

  Have you tried building a trivial static lib, exporting a proc or two, just to confirm that nim itself builds the static lib correctly?

  I just tried this on my laptop, with no issues. objdump -a shows that there are several object files within the resulting library archive file.

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