[Haskell-cafe] Re: Cabal and linking with static libs (.a files)

[Simon Marlow]

Ketil Malde wrote:

> Now you see it, now you don't. :-/
> 
> * .a files in /local/lib/foo-0.0/ghc-xxxx/  -- check
> * .a files named libfoo.a                   -- check
> * -lfoo on the command line                 -- check
> 
> Using strace shows that the .a file is indeed being read by ghc, but I
> still get "undefined reference".

No idea, I'm afraid.  ghc -v might help you.  Try cut-and-pasting the 
linker command line and play around with ordering of -l options.

As a matter of style, rather than using -lfoo on the command line you 
should use the extra-libraries field in the .cabal file.

> Apologies for being dense, but I can't seem to make it work at all.
> Is there a cabalized library that does this (links to a .a type C
> library) that I can look at?

Some of the standard packages do this, eg. 
http://darcs.haskell.org/package/network comes with a small amount of C 
code.  GHC doesn't currently use Cabal to build this, though.  I'm sure 
there are other Cabal packages out there that link to .a libraries, it's 
quite a common thing to do.

Cheers,
	Simon