I have a project which builds to several object files (.o) but the thing that confuses me is how to proceed from here if I want to create a single library file?
.so and .ar files, what is the difference between those?
I just want to create a basic library file which can be loaded by other libraries or executables. How about in case of static/dynamic libraries?
I'm using Kubuntu and gnu c compiler + gmake.
To make a .a library file:Originally Posted by str800
To make a .so shared object file:Code:ar ruvs libmylibrary.a *.o
Code:ld -shared -o libmylibrary.so *.oYou mean .a, not .ar. A .so is a shared object file which contains relocation information needed by the dynamic linker. All intra-library dependencies are pre-resolved and the code is packaged into a single object. Usually, when compiling code that will become a .so, you should use the -fPIC option of the gcc compiler to generate "position independent code.".so and .ar files, what is the difference between those?
A .a is just an archive of .o file (like tar, but not quite) which contains an index of symbol names to accelerate linking against the .o files in the archive. There is no need for -fPIC in this case.
And which you should choose depends a bit on what you want to do, and how you're planning for this to be used in a more large scale.
A shared library is loaded once in the system, only the data-section(s) of the shared library are "separate" if you have two or more applications using the library.
The application itself only holds a reference to the shared library ("load libmylibrary.so version x.y.z.w" when this app loads).
On the other hand, if you use a shared library, it needs to be available on the machine the application runs on. So if it's not a LARGE library and/or is expected to be used by many applications, it may be easier and more practical to use a "static" library (libmylibrary.a). Anythhing that is actually used in the library gets included into the final executable file.
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Mats
