Enabling +crt-static in a blanket way breaks dynamic libraries including proc macros

[petrochenkov]

This is pretty much rust-lang/cargo#7563 generalized, which was fixed in #69519, which I don't consider a correct or satisfactory solution.
#71586 may be a good preliminary reading.

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If you are building something with Cargo and set -C target-feature=+crt-static through RUSTFLAGS, or crt-static is enabled by default through a target specification, it will be set for all crates during the build, including proc macros and cdylibs (and build scripts?).

In most cases this is not an intention when we are enabling crt-static.
In most cases the intention is to enable it for executables only.

So if enabling crt-static for executables (via env var or a target spec) also enables it for libraries, it usually results only in "collateral damage".
If the target doesn't support +crt-static for libaries, we just get an error like rust-lang/cargo#7563 reported.
If the target supports +crt-static for libraries, we get a very weird library which is unlikely to work when dynamically loaded as a proc macro crate (I didn't verify that though).

As a result, we need a way to enable crt-static for executables without collaterally damaging libaries.
Moreover, this way should be the default.

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#71586 (comment) lists some possible alternatives of doing this.

• Automatically enable -Ctarget-feature=-crt-static for proc macro crates or all libraries in Cargo (cc @ehuss), modifying RUSTFLAGS. Question: how to opt-out?
• Introduce a new options -Ctarget-feature=+crt-static-dylib controlling static linking of libraries instead of -Ctarget-feature=-crt-static. It would almost never be used on Unix-like targets (not sure about windows-msvc and wasm).
• Keep the existing meaning of crt-static, but introduce a new option -C disable-crt-static-for-dylibs or something. Cargo would then use it for proc macro crates or all libraries. Question: how to opt-out?
• Ignore +crt-static for libraries if the target doesn't support it. This is fragile, musl actually supports it despite the current value of the flag of the musl target spec. If the flag is enabled, proc macros will break.
• Ignore +crt-static for libraries always. It is almost never used on Unix-like targets (not sure about windows-msvc and wasm). +crt-static-dylib looks strictly better.
• Have two crt-static defaults in target specs - one for executables and one for libraries. Solves one half of the problem, but explicit +crt-static in RUSTFLAGS will still cause collateral damage.

[petrochenkov]

I think a new option -Ctarget-feature=+crt-static-dylib (and corresponding target spec defaults) is the way to go here.

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The only thing we need to assess is compatibility for windows-msvc and wasm32-wasi targets which currently supports linking .dlls and .wasm libraries with +crt-static.

In case of WASM we can enable +crt-static-dylib by default though the target spec and keep full compatibility.

In case of Windows-MSVC I need @retep998's expertise here.
How common it is to use +crt-static to build DLLs on that target?
Would it be a noticeable breakage if we required using the new +crt-static-dylib for that instead?
(In any case we can always enable a special compatibility case "+crt-static implies +crt-static-dylib" for the windows-msvc target, if that turns out necessary.)

[retep998]

+crt-static for the cdylib crate type on Windows is completely valid and I imagine should be used just as often as +crt-static is for regular executables. Switching to a different flag for cdylibs would be a noticeable breakage, and I'd much prefer we don't break Windows users for an issue that doesn't affect them.

The big issue you have to care about on Windows with regards to the CRT is that you never share CRT objects across a dll boundary unless both sides are using the same dynamic CRT. Because using CRT types is very rare in the Rust ecosystem, and the proc macro interface does not have any CRT types in it, I see no reason why +crt-static can't be used for proc macros on Windows (although there's also no point as the proc macro binaries are never distributed).

[petrochenkov]

@alexcrichton
Could you answer a couple of questions regarding the meaning of +crt-static on wasm32-wasi?

Is it a common case to bundle libc (I'm not even sure what it does on the target) into wasm 1) executables and 2) libraries?
(I suspect the answer is yes, since that's the default in the target spec.)

Is it desirable to support the case of bundling libc, but linking dynamically to some other libraries?

[alexcrichton]

For wasm32-wasi the meaning of crt-static is sort of unrelated to dynamic/static linkage since the dynamic linkage story with wasm isn't quite as specified as other platforms. The meaning of crt-static is, as you've found, whether the bundled libc is used or whether an external libc is provided.

The purpose here is somewhat similar to MinGW where, by default, if you don't compile any C code in your application cargo build "just works". If, however, you'd like to link C/Rust code into the same wasm binary then you'll want the libc used to be the same, so whatever compiler is used to compile the C code should provide the libc for Rust as well. Using -crt-static indicates "go use some other compiler's libc implementation".

It's currently most common to not pass anything, meaning +crt-static is very common. AFAIK there's almost no major users of -crt-static for wasi. I am not personally wed at all to using crt-static for this option, and I think it'd be fine to tweak wasm to use something else entirely or a new definition.

[smaeul]

Part of the confusion here is that +crt-static means something totally different on MSVC and Linux. On MSVC, the flag is meaningful on any crate type (except rlib/staticlib, which don't get linked), and affects only the local crate. On Linux (musl), the flag is only meaningful on executables, but it affects everything linked into that executable. And on WASM it means something else entirely.

As far as I'm aware, crt-static works fine on MSVC, and there's no need to change anything there.

• Ignore +crt-static for libraries if the target doesn't support it. This is fragile, musl actually supports it despite the current value of the flag of the musl target spec. If the flag is enabled, proc macros will break.

I think this is the correct answer. Can you please expand on what makes it fragile? And what you're referring to that "musl actually supports"?

Linking a dylib/cdylib against musl's libc.a is not and will never be supported -- it puts a second, conflicting copy of libc global data (e.g. malloc state and locks) in your executable at runtime, which is more than likely to crash. The situation would be the same for glibc if rustc supported +crt-static there.

Ignoring +crt-static when compiling a dylib/cdylib, as opposed to producing an error like we do now, shouldn't cause any problems, because ignoring the flag doesn't "leak" into the executable. Since DSOs can't be linked from static executables anyway, the presence or absence of the dylib/cdylib crate cannot affect the resulting binary.

I would also expect it to be common for projects to provide both a dylib crate and executables (CLI, tests, etc.). I only see two ways to compile both from the same cargo command with crt_static_default == true and crt_static_allows_dylibs == false: either rustc ignores +crt-static for crate types other than Executable, or cargo specifies the right option on a per-crate basis.

[petrochenkov]

@smaeul
Thanks for all the references, I'll return to this in a few days and read them.

Linking a dylib/cdylib against musl's libc.a is not and will never be supported -- it puts a second, conflicting copy of libc global data (e.g. malloc state and locks) in your executable at runtime, which is more than likely to crash.

Sometimes having a separate copy of libc with all the global data in a .so is exactly the desired outcome.
My main use case for this setup is a plugin to a dynamic binary instrumentation system, which must not share libc with the instrumented program.
I'm doing it with bionic libc though, not with musl, and it works for a non-toy project.

And what you're referring to that "musl actually supports"?

With musl I tried it with "hello world"-like examples and it worked too :)

UPD: Clarification - I did all of this with C++ and gcc, not with Rust (it doesn't matter much in this case though).

[petrochenkov]

Some history in links: #71586 (comment)

[da-x]

If anyone's interested, here's the workaround I use for the simple case where the top crate has a program and you just want that crate to build static programs:

1. Intercept rustc:

RUSTC=/path/to/rustc.wrap cargo build

2. Sample rustc.wrap script:

#!/bin/bash

crate_name=0

for i in "$@" ; do
    if [[ $i == "--crate-name" ]] ; then
	crate_name=1
	continue
    elif [[ "$crate_name" == "1" ]] ; then
	if [[ "$i" == "crate-name-of-your-program" ]] ; then
	    set -- "$@" -C target-feature=+crt-static
	    break
	fi
    fi
    crate_name=0
done

exec rustc "$@"

[petrochenkov]

Copypasting from #90020 (comment):

I went through major targets supporting dynamic linking and they all seem to expose relatively similar behavior with regards to linking CRT (libc or analogues) dynamically or statically.
Here's some summary.

An executable and all its dynamic dependencies must share a common CRT for things like cross-binary exceptions and cross-binary allocations/deallocations on platform like Windows (which don't do most of OS interactions through CRT), and maybe for other shared resource management as well on platforms like Linux (which do most of OS interactions through CRT).
Next I'll consider different kinds of end binaries and their relationships with dynamic and static CRT.

• Executable without other dynamic dependencies - static libc is possible and not exotic.
• Executable with other dynamic dependencies - depends on the dependencies:
  • The dependencies don't produce cross-binary exceptions or allocations (on Windows), and don't link to CRT (on Linux) - static libc is possible and not exotic.
    • Example: the executable only depends on WinAPI DLLs.
  • The dependencies may produce cross-binary exceptions or allocations (on Windows), or link to CRT (on Linux) - static libc is possible, but exotic and shouldn't be done without an explicit request.
    • Example: the executable depends on Rust standard library as a dylib.
• Dynamic library with or without other dynamic dependencies - depends on itself and dependencies:
  • Neither the library itself nor its dependencies may produce cross-binary exceptions or allocations (on Windows), and the dependencies don't link to CRT (on Linux) - static libc is possible and not exotic.
    • Example: the library is a cdylib with C interface and only depends on WinAPI DLLs.
    • Example: the library is a cdylib which is a plugin for DynamoRIO binary instrumentation framework. It's an ELF, but it will be loaded by libdynamorio.so instead of a standard dynamic linker.
  • The library itself or its dependencies may produce cross-binary exceptions or allocations (on Windows), or the dependencies link to CRT (on Linux) - static libc is possible, but exotic and shouldn't be done without an explicit request.
    • Example: the library is a Rust dylib, or depends on Rust standard library as a dylib.
• Linking CRT dynamically is always possible and not exotic in all cases above.

Whether a dynamic library may require managing shared resources is ultimately a user's choice.
We can easily take "yes, it requires managing shared resources, and thus requires shared CRT" as a default for both Rust dylibs and native dylibs, and add a linking modifier for opting out, -needs-shareed-crt or something.

Side note: for targets doing dynamic linking in userspace via ELF interpreter field (Linux), we can remove the interpreter field and speedup their launch if there's no dynamic dependencies at all (CRT or others).

So the question is what "with(out) an explicit request" above means.
In general, I'd say -Ctarget-feature=-crt-static is explicit enough because dynamic linking is never exotic, but -Ctarget-feature=+crt-static is not explicit enough.

Considering the above, I think my suggested solution is:

• Keep the crt_static_respected target spec option, target with crt_static_respected=false behave in some hard-coded way, targets with crt_static_respected=true can be controlled using command-line options.
• Keep the -Ctarget-feature=+/-crt-static option and the crt_static_default target spec option. Take crt-static as value(-Ctarget-feature=+/-crt-static).unwrap_or(crt_static_default).
• If crt-static is false, then we link CRT dynamically.
• If crt-static is true, then we link CRT statically, if the situation is not exotic, otherwise we link CRT dynamically and maybe emit a warning telling the reason.
• The situation is exotic when
  • This is an executable and it has dynamic dependencies requiring managing shared resources.
  • This is a dynamic library and it has dynamic dependencies requiring managing shared resources.
  • This is a dynamic library and it requires managing shared resources.
  • For dependencies "requires managing shared resources" means that
    • It's a Rust dylib or proc macro crate.
    • It's a native dylib not marked with the -needs-shareed-crt link modifier.
  • For the current dynamic library "requires managing shared resources" means that
    • It's a Rust dylib or proc macro crate
      • Cdylibs are not considered requiring shared resources by default, if your cdylib requires them, just use -Ctarget-feature=-crt-static.
        • Or maybe we can have a target spec option controling whether cdylibs (the current one and native dependencies) require shared resources by default, e.g. it would be false on Windows and true on Linux.
• Add a new option -Cforce-crt-static.
  • It removes the "non-exotic" requirement from the conditions above and makes crt-static enable static CRT linking even in exotic cases.
  • Example: if +needs-shareed-crt is the default on Windows, then -Cforce-crt-static may be required to build statically while depending on WinAPI DLLs, until the winapi crate adopts -needs-shared-crt modifiers.
• Remove the crt_static_allows_dylibs target spec option, it's no longer necessary with our scheme.
• Issue: evaluating effective crt-static requires determining whether our situation is exotic, which requires evaluating some link-time cfgs, which requires evaluating effective crt-static.
  • Fortnately, it's boolean so there are only two values and we can likely try them both speculatively.

[oxalica]

This issue is still not resolved after a year. It blocks me from static linking (using glibc) projects has any proc-macro crates in the dependency closure. I think it's not something like "how to deal with crt-static on libs". It's the crt-static should applied to any build-time dependencies in the first place.

Maybe we should make cargo aware of this option in [profile.*], so we could treat build-time dependencies differently through [profile.*.build-override].