How can dawn be linked statically?

[anchpop]

It can be nice to have a self-contained executable and not have to worry about dynamic libraries. But dawn seems to be linked dynamically in the default configuration. I did some poking around but couldn't figure it out on my own :(

[eliemichel]

This is one of the reasons why the guide and the main branch of this repo still point to a not-so-recent version of Dawn. This was reported upstream because developers changed the build setup, making static linking a bit hard.

[eliemichel]

BTW I just added a proper release to mark the version of this distribution repo that is currently in use in the guide: v0.2.0.

[anchpop]

Ah, good to know I wasn't going crazy and missing something obvious! Thanks for creating the release too

[zcbenz]

I'm doing this to link dawn statically, which works with the current main branch:

add_executable(hello_world hello_world.cc)
target_link_libraries(hello_world PRIVATE dawn::dawn_common
                                          dawn::dawn_native
                                          dawn::dawn_wgpu_utils
                                          dawncpp_headers
                                          dawncpp)

# Build the procs that call dawn_native directly.
find_package(Python3 REQUIRED)
DawnJSONGenerator(TARGET "webgpu_dawn_native_proc"
                  PRINT_NAME "Dawn native WebGPU procs"
                  OUTPUT_SOURCES WEBGPU_DAWN_NATIVE_PROC_GEN_SOURCES)
target_sources(hello_world PRIVATE ${WEBGPU_DAWN_NATIVE_PROC_GEN_SOURCES})