It feels strange to me to use -Wl,-Bstatic in order to tell gcc which libraries I want to link with statically. After all I'm telling gcc directly all other information about linking with libraries (-Ldir, -llibname).
Is it possible to tell the gcc driver directly which libraries should be linked statically?
Clarification: I know that if a certain library exists only in static versions it'll use it without -Wl,-Bstatic, but I want to imply gcc to prefer the static library. I also know that specifying the library file directly would link with it, but I prefer to keep the semantic for including static and dynamic libraries the same.
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It is possible of course, use -l: instead of -l. For example -l:libXYZ.a to link with libXYZ.a. Notice the lib written out, as opposed to -lXYZ which would auto expand to libXYZ.
You can add .a file in the linking command:
gcc yourfiles /path/to/library/libLIBRARY.a
But this is not talking with gcc driver, but with ld linker as options like -Wl,anything are.
When you tell gcc or ld -Ldir -lLIBRARY, linker will check both static and dynamic versions of library (you can see a process with -Wl,--verbose). To change order of library types checked you can use -Wl,-Bstatic and -Wl,-Bdynamic. Here is a man page of gnu LD: http://linux.die.net/man/1/ld
To link your program with lib1, lib3 dynamically and lib2 statically, use such gcc call:
gcc program.o -llib1 -Wl,-Bstatic -llib2 -Wl,-Bdynamic -llib3
Assuming that default setting of ld is to use dynamic libraries (it is on Linux).
Source: Stackoverflow.com