Statically Linking freeglut

Posted 2020-11-02 1CM

It’s possible statically link freeglut into your applications, instead of dynamically linking against the DLL as detailed above. The main disadvantage of static linking is that when an updated version of freeglut becomes available, the application must be recompiled in order to use the newer version. This is much more effort than when using dynamic linking, where it’s only necessary to deploy the newer version of the DLL—if your user has freeglut knowledge, they could even do this for their self! In any case, if you do want to use static linking it’s fairly simple.

The compilation step is almost the same as before, except that you need to define “FREEGLUT_STATIC” before any freeglut headers are included. This is best done by adding “-D FREEGLUT_STATIC” to the compiler command line. The linker step is also slightly different, as you must specify the static version of the freeglut library rather than the dynamic import library. It’s additionally necessary to link against the Windows multimedia library and GDI libraries, as freeglut uses functions from both of these libraries.

Given a source file “example.c”, which you want to compile to an application “example.exe”, you can compile and link it with the static freeglut library using following commands:

gcc -c -o example.o example.c -D FREEGLUT_STATIC -I"C:\Program Files\Common Files\MinGW\freeglut\include"

gcc -o example.exe example.o -L"C:\Program Files\Common Files\MinGW\freeglut\lib" -lfreeglut_static -lopengl32 -lwinmm ^
-lgdi32 -Wl,--subsystem,windows
[Windows 7 Command Prompt showing the compile and link commands being executed.]
If you get undefined references to functions when trying to statically link freeglut into your application, check your preprocessor definition and linker flags—static linking will fail if you forget to define “FREEGLUT_STATIC”, or if you have defined it but are linking against wrong libraries.