static-haskell-nix VS LambdaHack

Using Nix: https://github.com/nh2/static-haskell-nix

To debug this type of problem (I have to debug linker errors regularly as part of static-haskell-nix):

In static-haskell-nix there is currently this PR to enable support for that: https://github.com/nh2/static-haskell-nix/pull/108

I think there's a misunderstanding: Most people want to use the .a file from their Linux/package distro that provides static libraries, such as Alpine Linux or nixpkgs.

Such package distributions just use the build system default options to build static libs. For example, Alpine might use `-Ddefault_library=both`.

> if they could keep that libgtk_static around

Why make these special cases instead of just using the build system defaults? That's easier to maintain and more obvious.

> I'd be interested to hear if static linking GTK even has that many benefits

One benefit is almost-infinite backwards compatibility that the Linux and Xorg ABIs provide, being able to make GUI apps that work out of the box everywhere.

Another is that these generated executables are very small, e.g. 12 MB for a full static GTK GUI app [1], or 6 MB when xz-compressed.

This is much less than when using shared libraries. One reason is that dead-code elimination works much better for static linking: It links in only the functions you actually use. For dynamic linking, it's always the entire .so.

[1] https://github.com/nh2/static-haskell-nix/releases/tag/c-sta...

GTK can be statically linked.

Example executable:

https://github.com/nh2/static-haskell-nix/releases/tag/c-sta...

It lost this ability temporarily when switching to Meson, but I fixed it in GTK3 and GTK4. But I just checked and apparently it is broken again:

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/3774#note_109746...

Looks really cool! Here's how I do releases: https://github.com/LambdaHack/LambdaHack/issues/76

here's the failed commit: https://github.com/LambdaHack/LambdaHack/commit/930dfd46b949d1525e900b997137389a8092305b

I've recently tried that and gave up (https://github.com/LambdaHack/LambdaHack/issues/248). Perhaps it's possible to statically link SDL2, but I learnt it's impossible to statically link the OpenGL and X11 libraries, so you end up with a partially statically linked binary (I didn't manage to obtain even that).

I did some plotline sketches on the github wiki of my project, but never used them so far. Not much use from the other musings there, either. Instead I tweak the templates for procedural generation directly in the code (game content part of the code, to be precise) and get a lot of mileage out of that. The only page of the wiki I got lots of benefit from is the derivation of the simplified formula for calculating speed, distance and damage of projectile from their weight: https://github.com/LambdaHack/LambdaHack/wiki/Item-statistics#projectile-velocity-and-distance

Around a decade. No, one release per 1-2 years. The differences are quite large, both gameplay and, even more, UI, in particular in using ready fornts, then custom fonts, then many fonts at once. See the changelogs (that's only for the egine, but that's where most of the changes are made): https://github.com/LambdaHack/LambdaHack/releases