Dearest Monks, I'm trying to create a small C program that uses Perl to work with some YAML (XS).

Everything works, except that I really need this to be statically linked so that I only have a single executable that packs the Perl libraries + the LibYAML XS libs. I need it that way for distribution purposes where no Perl or LibYAML can be installed (but other dependencies may be ok, like LibC, etc.).

Like a Golang freak colleague says, this would be "just like Go". He urges me to use Go instead, but I just can't believe a C-Perl compiled interpreter could not do the job just as well :)

Searching around in the we takes me to staticperl, which is a quite complicated beast, based on Perl 5.12 and not really what I'm looking for.

Here's a proof-of-concept program and the compilation line. 

#include <EXTERN.h>
#include <perl.h>

static PerlInterpreter *my_perl;

int main(int argc, char **argv, char **env)
{
    PERL_SYS_INIT3(&argc,&argv,&env);
    PL_exit_flags |= PERL_EXIT_DESTRUCT_END;
    char *embedding[] = { "", "-e", "0" };

    my_perl = perl_alloc();
    perl_construct(my_perl);

    perl_parse(my_perl, NULL, 3, embedding, NULL);
    perl_run(my_perl);

    eval_pv( "use YAML::XS;", TRUE );

    perl_destruct(my_perl);
    perl_free(my_perl);
    PERL_SYS_TERM();
}

[download]

cc myprog.c -o myprog `perl -MExtUtils::Embed -e ccopts -e ldopts`

[download]

Note I'm not using the Dynaloader in this example as I assume, if correctly linked as a static binary, my binary would not need Perl's Dynaloader... right?

In reply to Compiling C program with a Static Perl by rodd

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