Building R statically

build-static-R.sh

#!/usr/bin/env bash

R_VERSION="4.3.2"

curl -O "https://cran.rstudio.com/src/base/R-4/R-${R_VERSION}.tar.gz"
tar -xzvf "R-${R_VERSION}.tar.gz"
rm "R-${R_VERSION}.tar.gz"
cd "R-${R_VERSION}" || exit

mkdir build/

CC=clang                                   \
CXX=clang++                                \
FC=gfortran                                \
CFLAGS="-O3"                               \
CXXFLAGS="-O3"                             \
LDFLAGS="-Bstatic,-dn,-non_shared,-static" \
PKG_CONFIG="pkg-config --static"           \
    ./configure                            \
    --prefix="$(realpath build)"           \
    --disable-R-shlib                      \
    --enable-R-static-lib                  \
    --enable-static=yes                    \
    --enable-shared=no                     \
    --enable-long-double                   \
    --disable-rpath                        \
    --without-readline                     \
    --without-tcltk                        \
    --without-cairo                        \
    --without-libpng                       \
    --without-jpeglib                      \
    --without-libtiff                      \
    --with-internal-tzcode                 \
    --with-internal-towlower               \
    --with-internal-iswxxxxx               \
    --with-internal-wcwidth                \
    --without-x
    
make
make install

Building-R-Statically.md

Note

This is a work-in-progress.

This is an attempt at creating standalone R executables by embedding and evaluating R code through C via a static R build.

Currently, by using the below script, we receive libR.a and associated BLAS/LAPACK internal shared libraries. libR.A is ~6MiB, but is halved to ~3.3MiB when stripped. However, it's not completely static at this point, as some dependencies like PCRE are still dynamically linked (which, might be due to needing --enable-static=pcre or something?)