Flag for #[link = "..."] Attribute

[cramertj]

It'd be nice if the bindgen CLI had an arg that would allow setting the name of the library to be linked against, which would then be emitted as #[link = "<somename>"] attributes. I'd be happy to try my hand at a PR for this if it's wanted.

[emilio]

Why doesn't --raw-line address that?

[emilio]

That is, I understand it's more convenient to say --link foo (or something else), than --raw-line '#[link = "<foo"]', but I don't think the later is completely unreasonable either.

[cramertj]

That is, I understand it's more convenient to say --link foo (or something else), than --raw-line '#[link = "<foo"]', but I don't think the later is completely unreasonable either.

Nah, definitely not unreasonable, but I think that --link is more discoverable and would be a good bit more ergonomic.

[emilio]

I'm not opposed to this if there's demand for this... It'd be nice to know what people use --raw-line for :).

But I also wouldn't want bindgen to end up with even more options for niche use cases. links have different kinds and we'd need to expose a flexible enough API, which is why I ended up removing the (already-useless because I forgot about them when rewriting bindgen) options in #104.

In any case, fine getting them back if it's a very frequent thing to do. Though given not so many people ended up caring about #104 I doubt it's the case.

[cramertj]

In any case, fine getting them back if it's a very frequent thing to do. Though given not so many people ended up caring about #104 I doubt it's the case.

@emilio Interesting-- I would've guessed it would be very common. Do you figure most people are adding the link declarations via a build script, or are they just already including them elsewhere in their projects?

[emilio]

I don't know at all. I assume for build scripts you can println!("cargo:rustc-link-lib=foo") on your build.rs, and for CLI usage people drop the link attributes in some other part of the project or what not.

[LegNeato]

I am trying to statically link (kind = "static") and the generated default appears to be dynamic. This will be nice to have but in the meantime I'll use println!("cargo:rustc-link-lib=foo")