Creating fully self-contained and pre-compiled library

General Usage
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Another update, this time about Artifacts. I think to remember I read something about juliac and Artifacts, and that PackageCompiler has functionality to collect all required Artifacts – but don’t remember where. Any pointers are welcome, thanks!

Artifacts are the binary dependencies (compiled shared libraries, mostly) some packages rely on. These are automatically downloaded to a dedicated folder (something like <user-folder>.julia/artifacts), and the julia runtime knows where to look for them.

Now, there’s not much documentation on this; Artifacts · The Julia Language is quite minimalistic and the referenced section about Pkg is intended for package devs. There is some more explanation in Custom binaries · JuMP.

When I use a package which requires artifacts (my example is jump-dev/HiGHS.jl) and use juliac to generate a binary, upon execution I get the error:

ErrorException("`ccall` requires the compiler")

Now:

  • What is meant by the “compiler”? Initially I thought libLLVM* (which I remove due to its size) or a C compiler such as gcc (which I do have available). → But it seems to be libjulia-codegen* AND libLLVM*. Together, they are 218MB and, what concerns me more, make up all the dynamic “interpreted”/JIT-compiled machinery of julia, which I exactly do NOT want in a fully pre-compiled binary.
  • Why is it needed for a ccall?
  • How do I identify all required artifacts, and where do I put them (under Windows and Linux), absolute and relative to my juliac-generated binary?
    • I can run the “MWE” in juliac-compiled form, when staying on the build machine with the auto-downloaded artifacts stil in place.
    • Would just be good to know which artifacts are actually downloaded and used, where they are, and if I could package them into a portable “distribution” somehow.
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