And also as far as I know it is possible to sign shared libraries and perform checks before actually calling them. But I am not sure if it’s really the case, because if shared libraries are exposed for hacking then it probably means that the whole OS is compromised, so there is no much point to fight the fire in the ashtray when entire building is on fire. Speaking about security - that one usually references to the fact that application relying on shared libraries is easier to hack (because you can replace libraries with the modified ones). Not bad indeed, but again - this is just a simplified example, and real numbers probably won’t be that exciting. Here’s a simplified picture about it:Īs you can see, even though 1 statically linked application takes less space than 1 dynamically linked, but when you have 4 applications, then you can save more space on your disk by using dynamic linking: 620 - 220 = 400 MB of space saved. However, if your deployment target has several Qt-based applications, then static linking is not that attractive in terms of saving space, because in case of dynamic linking every Qt-based application can use the same set of shared Qt libraries, which you need to deploy only once. Having built your application statically linked, you get everything all-in-one - a single executable file which is very easy to deploy and it will have a smaller size comparing with its dynamically linked equivalent. But, first of all, copying just Qt libraries is not enough, there are some other libraries that need to be deployed along, and secondly, the final size of the deployed application can easily exceed a couple of hundreds of megabytes, which is not really okay even for desktop targets, not to say about embedded devices with quite a limited space available. What I did in the past - I just copied the entire set of Qt libraries to the application directory and then application started working. While everything works on your development machine, being deployed on another machine your applications most likely will complain about all sorts of missing libraries.
#QT MAC INSTALL DEBUG SYMBOLS INSTALL#
$ make -j8 install Why build Qt staticallyĭeployment of dynamically linked Qt applications always was (is) not a trivial task. configure -static -release -no -pch -prefix "/path/to/qt/5.15.2-static" -skip qtwebengine -nomake tests -nomake examples The article has really exploded in volume over the years, so here are some general commands for configuration and building static Qt. Variable has incomplete type struct stat64.Could not find the Qt platform plugin XCB.QQmlApplicationEngine failed to load component, qtquick2plugin not found.Non-existent module or unknown command line option.Text is not visible, because there are no fonts.I always used dynamic builds and had lots of involuntary sexual intercourses with macdeployqt/ windeployqt ( perhaps I should write about this too).īut not anymore, because I finally overcame my fears/stupidity/laziness, RTFMed and managed to build Qt statically.Īlthough the article is about making a static build, it also covers the task of building Qt from sources in general. For quite a long time statically built Qt was kind of a mystery to me.