12.2.5 Static Linking

Older versions of SWI-Prolog were shipped by default with a static library. In recent versions we no longer ship a static library because practically every OS properly supports dynamic linking without serious drawbacks and dynamic linking has several advantages. It is on many platforms required to be able to load SWI-Prolog foreign libraries (see use_foreign_library/1). Only on ELF based systems such as Linux we can load foreign libraries if the main executable is linked to export its global symbols (gcc -rdynamic option). Another advantage of dynamic libraries is that the user does not have to worry about libraries that this particular build of SWI-Prolog requires such as libgmp as well as OS specific libraries.

If one really wants a static library, use the CMake flag -DSWIPL_STATIC_LIB=ON while configuring a build from source. This causes building and installing libswipl_static.a. Note the _static postfix to avoid a name conflict on Windows between the import library and the static library.^{212As is, the Windows build is cross-compiled using MinGW which produces libswipl_static.a. This file can, as far as we know, not be used by MSVC.}.