5 ms·

I tried out Crystal and Kemal a few months ago and really enjoyed it. However, one issue that's preventing me from wanting to take it to production is that appa

• sjtgraham 8y ago
  Do you mean statically linked binaries? Fat binaries generally refer to multiple ABIs in the same image, a mostly Apple thing these days.
  • snake_case 8y ago
    I'm referring to fat binaries like the one Golang would compile too. Apologies if I have some terms mixed up here! Golang produces one single binary you can deploy to your target environment and doesn't really require anything else installed. From what I've read, Crystal generates a binary but you also need to ensure Crystal is installed on your target environment.
    • floatboth 8y ago
      Golang makes statically linked binaries. (Well, until you use cgo.) By default, Crystal generates dynamically linked binaries. You absolutely do not need Crystal to run them. But you do need: - Boehm GC (libgc-threaded) - libevent - PCRE if the program uses regexps - libyaml if the program uses yaml - OpenSSL if the program uses crypto/TLS (?) Here's an example ldd output: /usr/local/bin/shards: libyaml-0.so.2 => /usr/local/lib/libyaml-0.so.2 (0x8c0bb1e000) libpcre.so.1 => /usr/local/lib/libpcre.so.1 (0x8c0bd3c000) libm.so.5 => /lib/libm.so.5 (0x8c0bfb8000) libgc-threaded.so.1 => /usr/local/lib/libgc-threaded.so.1 (0x8c0c1e6000) libthr.so.3 => /lib/libthr.so.3 (0x8c0c444000) libevent-2.1.so.6 => /usr/local/lib/libevent-2.1.so.6 (0x8c0c66c000) libgcc_s.so.1 => /lib/libgcc_s.so.1 (0x8c0c8c3000) libc.so.7 => /lib/libc.so.7 (0x8c0cad2000) libdl.so.1 => /usr/lib/libdl.so.1 (0x8c0ce8f000) libcrypto.so.42 => /usr/local/lib/libcrypto.so (0x8c0d091000) You can try `crystal build --static` though :)
      • snake_case 8y ago
        Thanks for explaining! In other threads, I've seen people refer to them as fat binaries, but yes, I've also seen them referred to as statically linked binaries.
• e12e 8y ago
  Not sure when/if this changed recently, but from: https://crystal-lang.org/docs/using_the_compiler/ https://crystal-lang.org/docs/using_the_compiler/ "Creating a standalone executable": crystal build some_program.cr --release --static Builds a static binary (just tried it on Ubuntu 18.04 with a simple hello-world).
  • sam0x17 8y ago
    You're going to have much better luck with an alpine-based docker image. Unfortunately non-musl based systems have a lot of issues with static compilation, so while this will work with hello world, if you try something more complicated you will likely get linker errors.
    • e12e 8y ago
      Particular to the c library? Because an "ldd" on the hello world listed quite a few libs which all worked fine with a static build.
      • sam0x17 8y ago
        openssl and libz are particularly fussy
        • e12e 8y ago
          I could definitely see openssl being tricky (libz not so much, but I might very well be naive here) - but how does changing the libc help with either?
          • RX14 8y ago
            glibc has some plugins which make it not easy to statically link. Musl doesn't have that. And alpine compiles openssl etc. with a config amenable to static linking. It's all about distro choices.
  • snake_case 8y ago
• sam0x17 8y ago
  You can use my alpine docker image to statically compile without any fuss: https://hub.docker.com/r/durosoft/crystal-alpine/ https://hub.docker.com/r/durosoft/crystal-alpine/ I'll be updating it later today with 0.25.1 support. You can statically compile a local crystal file using a docker one-liner that is included in the description.
  • snake_case 8y ago
    That's great! I've only heard complaints that it's difficult to statically compile. Sounds like a solved problem though.
    • sam0x17 8y ago
      The docker approach is I think a well kept secret but I'm trying to get more people to realize it's a thing. My gcf.cr tool abstracts this away for you if you are deploying to a Google Cloud Function
• RX14 8y ago
  Crystal supports static linking with `--static`, unfortunately glibc and openssl don't like static linking, so it turns out to be easier to do in an alpine linux chroot/container/etc which uses musl instead of glibc. Crystal is in the alpine linux repositories as of 3.8, so this should be now a lot easier. If someone wants to generate some good tooling around this workflow, it'd be greatly appreciated.
  • yxhuvud 8y ago
    I wonder if it is possible to do something that staticly link everything except the few libraries that misbehave.
    • ricardobeat 8y ago
      There isn't much else left to link - iirc openssl, glibc, libevent, libpcre are all it needs.