I think there's a misunderstanding: Most people want to use the .a file from their Linux/package distro that provides static libraries, such as Alpine Linux or

I think there's a misunderstanding: Most people want to use the .a file from their Linux/package distro that provides static libraries, such as Alpine Linux or nixpkgs. Such package distributions just use the build system default options to build static libs. For example, Alpine might use `-Ddefault_library=both`. > if they could keep that libgtk_static around Why make these special cases instead of just using the build system defaults? That's easier to maintain and more obvious. > I'd be interested to hear if static linking GTK even has that many benefits One benefit is almost-infinite backwards compatibility that the Linux and Xorg ABIs provide, being able to make GUI apps that work out of the box everywhere. Another is that these generated executables are very small, e.g. 12 MB for a full static GTK GUI app [1], or 6 MB when xz-compressed. This is much less than when using shared libraries. One reason is that dead-code elimination works much better for static linking: It links in only the functions you actually use. For dynamic linking, it's always the entire .so. [1] https://github.com/nh2/static-haskell-nix/releases/tag/c-static-gtk3-apps-button-example-2020-11-23 https://github.com/nh2/static-haskell-nix/releases/tag/c-sta...