Earlier quoted context omitted.
Notice how Windows, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and (removed in 6.0) OpenBSD all have Linux emulation/compat layers. This is in fact incredibly sad, for multiple reasons: - This is what POSIX was meant to address; there aren't all that many Linux-specific APIs that ordinary applications actually need. Proof: browse the ports/packages on any BSD; all the apps (with extremely few notable omissions) are there and working fine. - V…
This is relevant to my interests. What roadblocks did you run into when you attempted to build statically? I assume your goal was to have a single binary of Love2D so you can swap it around and not worry about glibc version? (As God intended imo; not religious but games should be one contained thing imo) Am curious to see what it does to avoid a static build.
I really, really wanted to ship binary builds for the three major platforms: Windows, Mac, and Linux; so that my friends and strangers could actually play the games, without dicking around downloading some framework. Love2d uses the relatively well-known hack of opening "argv[0]" as a ZIP file (the ZIP header starts at the end of a file, so this usually[0] just works).
Creating and testing the builds for Windows was trivial - even though I didn't even have Windows on any of my computers; I borrowed a friend's laptop to verify that "cat love.exe game.love > game.exe" just works, and indeed it did. They got some scary warnings about binaries downloaded from the Internet, but the game ran well.
The Mac needed a bit more fiddling, and I didn't have a Mac back then to sign or test the build. But I followed the instructions and someone reported success (modulo scary warnings). Woohoo.
On to Linux... I already knew it was going to be the most "fun", despite being the only platform among these three that didn't do code signing or scary warnings. I didn't even realize at the time, how much of a clusterfuck glibc actually is; my primary motivation was that Love2d kept breaking their Lua APIs, and I've already found that lots of older (and even recent) Love2d games simply couldn't cope. My game had to be bound to a specific version of Love2d, and many distributions shipped different versions, so the only reasonable path forward was to bundle, just like on Windows/Mac.
I started by downloading the Love2d sources, verifying that I can make a standard/dynamic build, and then "cat love game.love > game && chmod +x game && ./game". Indeed that was easy, but "ldd game" revealed several dozen shared libraries for things like PNG, Vorbis, etc, etc. I've looked at the .so numbers, and realized Love2d breaking is gonna be the lesser of my worries - judging by how high these numbers were, I was signing up for DLL hell. I didn't even want PNG or Vorbis - all of my graphics were 100% procedural, and I was yet to try adding sound to any game. So I've disabled most options, and this is where the easy part ended.
I don't recall where exactly I gave up... I managed to find & download the sources for a whole bunch of these libraries, make the ".a" archives for static builds, and so on... I think at some point I've ran into Mesa (Love2d actually requires GPU acceleration) and decided that this is enough insanity.
I still firmly believe in static linking on Linux! I only changed my approach: just use Go (with CGO_ENABLED=0). Unfortunately, Go is not without its own share of problems[0]; while XGB allows cgo-less X11, Mesa remains elusive.
[0]: https://flak.tedunangst.com/post/the-three-line-single-binar...