org.suls.blog

In order to prevent myself becoming a suit wearing, management blahblah speaking or Web x.y promoting software engineer, I decided to learn a "real" programming language: C. (Learning in this case means doing useful things, not just hello-world crap)
The desicion was easily made and so did the problems occur. Even before I started to write code! To be more precisely the first thing i struggled with was the Makefile.. I used the sample file from here which is working with multiple directories but I always got this strange error message:

/usr/bin/ld: can't locate file for: -lcrt0.o
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status

I didn't have any clue where crt0.o comes from nor what it is (well, i still don't know actually) but I knew that -l has something to do with libraries. While checking the Makefiles again I discovered that two modules include a library with the -static argument. I looked into man gcc once again and finally got surprised:

 -static
     On systems that support dynamic linking, this prevents
     linking with the shared libraries.  On other systems, 
     this option has no effect.

     This option will not work on Mac OS X unless all
     libraries (including libgcc.a) have also been compiled
     with -static.  Since neither a static version of 
     libSystem.dylib nor crt0.o are provided, this option is
     not useful to most people.

All I had to do now was changing the first line to the second.

# LDFLAGS = -static -L$(LIBSDIR)
LDFLAGS = -L$(LIBSDIR)

Conclusion: build system works fine but nothing's really there to be built :)