2024-04-21-static-linking

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Following the excellent post from Tom Sydney “Getting your Haskell executable statically linked with Nix”, I want to present an alternative approach.

I believe nix has questionable ergnomics and most Haskell developers don’t need it, even if they want to link their binaries statically.

GHC/cabal don’t really know how to do partial static linking, unless you employ some trickery. So we need a system where we can link everything statically, including libc. This leads us to the Musl libc, which has good support for static linking.

In order to use Alpine Linux as a build environment, we need proper toolchain support. GHCup supports Alpine Linux as a first class citizen, so you should be able to install GHC on Alpine. If you run into issues, open a bug report.

We need a clean build environment that is reproducible (-ish). We can use docker, which has excellent support for Alpine Linux containers.

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