Build option to build a shared library and link it with the resulting binaries

[mkoncek]

Is there a reason why there is no libmruby.so?
Even if mruby is intended as a small implemetation to be statically linked, same goes for example for Lua, which is still usually found as a shared library in Linux distributions.

[dearblue]

Try specifying build_config/host-shared.rb as the build configuration file.
A shared object file should be generated.

% rake -m MRUBY_CONFIG=host-shared clean all

However, as far as I understand, there are several problems.

• It does not yet support Microsoft VisualC++.
  The build configuration file only supports gcc/clang compatible compilers.
  Requires a developer for MSVC.

• The executable files built as mrbgems contain the absolute path to libmruby.so in the build directory.
  For example, the mruby command built on FreeBSD has the following required libraries.

  % ldd build/host/bin/mruby
  build/host/bin/mruby:
          /var/tmp/mruby/build/host/lib/libmruby.so (0xae43fe2b000)
          libm.so.5 => /lib/libm.so.5 (0xae43e9ab000)
          libc.so.7 => /lib/libc.so.7 (0xae43f84c000)
          [vdso] (0xae43e379000)

• Replacing it with a relative path requires a change to the mruby build system.
  In addition, the proper specification of the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable is required, at least when executing commands done internally.
  Otherwise, no test can be performed, and the mrbc command cannot be called before that.

[mkoncek]

Thank you, I found the MRUBY_CONFIG=host-shared option later. You are right about those issues and there is one more: Linux distributions tend to add special compiler flags such as -Wl,-soname,libmruby.so.3.3 indicating the binary compatibility.

I was able to produce a working result by removing the binaries and recompiling them manually as well as compiling the .so manually using -Wl,--whole-archive lib/libmruby.a.