Support for out of the box static linking

When running in environments like AWS Lambda you don't have access to basic shared libraries Haskell needs like libgmp, libffi. Need good support for static linked libraries of anything included in a basic GHC distribution.

https://github.com/commercialhaskell/stack/issues/1032

Trac metadata

Trac field	Value
Version	7.10.2
Type	FeatureRequest
TypeOfFailure	OtherFailure
Priority	normal
Resolution	Unresolved
Component	Package system
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changed weight to 5

added Tfeature request Trac import package system labels

Do you want GHC itself to be statically linked against C libraries, or the programs that GHC produces?

Emit static linked binaries, but yes if we wanted to run GHC on AWS Lambda we would need to static link GHC itself. I did this with Ruby1.8 for the BlueGene/L. Biggest pain was link order.

Is -optl-static not enough?

No. You need static versions of the libraries that you bring in. That's a wget from http://libfoo.org/, configure;make; make install for each libfoo.a you are missing in your Haskell dev toolchain.

Well of course ghc is not going to do the wget for you, and this is the ghc bug tracker.

To put it another way: What concrete change to ghc are you asking for?

http://downloads.haskell.org/~ghc/7.10.2/ghc-7.10.2-x86_64-unknown-linux-centos66.tar.bz2 needs to include the static versions of libffi, libgmp, and other standard libraries that GHC links to.

Yeah, that would be a nice thing to have. Now ghc build system is pissed given

GhcStage2HcOpts = -optl-static -optl-pthread -static

/home/l29ah/projects/climate/buildroot-musl/output/host/usr/bin/../lib/gcc/arm-buildroot-linux-musleabihf/4.9.3/../../../../arm-buildroot-linux-musleabihf/bin/ld.gold: error: cannot find -lHStransformers-0.4.3.0-ghc7.11.20151108
/home/l29ah/projects/climate/buildroot-musl/output/host/usr/bin/../lib/gcc/arm-buildroot-linux-musleabihf/4.9.3/../../../../arm-buildroot-linux-musleabihf/bin/ld.gold: error: cannot find -lHStemplate-haskell-2.11.0.0-ghc7.11.20151108
/home/l29ah/projects/climate/buildroot-musl/output/host/usr/bin/../lib/gcc/arm-buildroot-linux-musleabihf/4.9.3/../../../../arm-buildroot-linux-musleabihf/bin/ld.gold: error: cannot find -lHSpretty-1.1.2.0-ghc7.11.20151108
/home/l29ah/projects/climate/buildroot-musl/output/host/usr/bin/../lib/gcc/arm-buildroot-linux-musleabihf/4.9.3/../../../../arm-buildroot-linux-musleabihf/bin/ld.gold: error: cannot find -lHSprocess-1.4.0.0-ghc7.11.20151108
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added Pnormal label