Static build of SFML

Benefits of Static Linking

• No External Dependencies at Runtime: Everything is inside your executable—no need to distribute .dll/.so/.dylib files.
• Better Portability: Easier to distribute your app across platforms and package it as a single binary.
• Less Risk of Version Conflicts: No mismatches with external SFML versions on user systems.
• Possible Performance Boost: Compilers can optimize better (e.g., inlining functions), though the gain is usually small.

Downsides of Static Builds

🛠️ When to Use a Static Build?

The goal in this tutorial is to create a static build of SFML.

For visual studio

The first thing to do is pick the version compiled with the right version on the official website

If you have a 64 bits computer you can still pick the 32 bits version to support the older computers.
But nowaday a lot of softwares drop the 32 bit support. In my opinion you can pick the 64 bit version with no problem.

After Creating a project with visual studio add a main cpp file.

Unzip the file you downloaded, After that in the main you can add:

#include <SFML/Graphics.hpp>

int main() {
	sf::RenderWindow window(sf::VideoMode(400, 200), "SFML Installation");
	
	while (window.isOpen()) {
		sf::Event ev;
		while (window.pollEvent(ev)) {
			if (ev.type == sf::Event::Closed)
				window.close();
		}
	}

	return 0;
}

The you need to add the dll in the folder of the executable.

• sfml-graphics-2.dll
• sfml-system-2.dll
• sfml-window-2.dll

What if I don’t want to have to pack all the dlls for each modules ?
For that you will need to static link the SFML library, meaning the library will be pack in the executable.
On my computer with the DLLs the executable is very small : 10Kb.

Static linking

The first thing to do is change the linking of the libraries and take the static version of the SFML and the dependencies :



SFML need to know the linking mode, so we need to define the macro SFML_STATIC :



If the SFML library has been compiled with argument MT, meaning the runtime library is statically linked you need to change the code generation :



You can download the example of static build of sfml : SFMLTutorials.exe
In this case even the static version is pretty small 109KB :).