The -static option of ghc, and choice between user-supplied library types (Unix)

[Dimitry Golubovsky]

The Paragraph 4.10.7 of the GHC users guide contains this:

-static
Tell the linker to avoid shared Haskell libraries, if possible. This
is the default.

-dynamic
Tell the linker to use shared Haskell libraries, if available (this
option is only supported on Mac OS X at the moment, and also note that
your distribution of GHC may not have been supplied with shared
libraries).

As I understand, this is related to the GHC own libraries. What about
user-supplied libraries (listed in the `extra-libraries' field of a
Cabal package description) e. g.:

extra-libraries: gd, jpeg, m

from http://www.cs.chalmers.se/~bringert/darcs/haskell-gd/gd.cabal

There are usually files like libm.a and libm.so together in the same
directory where GHC looks for libraries.

Does the -static / -dynamic ghc flag affect the choice which library
to link against?Or, to control this, one has to descend to the linker
options, and the default would be the linker default?

I believe, this is Unix-specific: AFAIR on Windows (and OS/2) dynamic
implibs were indistinguishable by their names from static libraries
and had the .lib suffix anyway?

--
Dimitry Golubovsky

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