I am trying to create a static executable with Rust. I am not trying to statically link a particular library, I am trying to create a executable which does not
Since Rust 1.19, you can statically link the C runtime (CRT) to avoid this very common situation on Windows:
The program can't start because VCRUNTIME140.dll is missing from your computer. Try reinstalling the program to fix this problem.
Add this to your .cargo/config
file, using the appropriate target triple for your platform:
[target.x86_64-pc-windows-msvc]
rustflags = ["-C", "target-feature=+crt-static"]
An alternative to editing .cargo/config
is to pass -C target-feature=+crt-static
to rustc by hand.
See also:
RFC
Pull Request
Cargo config documentation
Rust statically links everything but glibc (and libgcc, iirc) by default.
If you want to get a 100% statically linked binary, you can use MUSL with 1.1. https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/24777 is the initial support, we hope to make it much easier to use in the future.