Compiling a fortran program on linux and moving the executable to another linux machine

Question

I have a code that I have written in Fortran during my PhD, and now I am collaborating with some researcher that uses Linux, and they need my model, that is basically a single executable file. In the future I will probably make it open source, but up to know they just want the executable, also because they are not programmers and they have never compiled a program in their life. So the question is: is it possible to compile it on my linux machine and then send it to them in order to use it in another linux machine?Or does the linux version and distribution matter? thank you very much A.

Answer 1

If you do not use many libraries you can do that. One option is statically linking the executable ( -static or similar compiler option). You need to have the static versions of all needed libraries for that. The have .a suffix. They are often not installed by default in Linux distributions and often they are not supplied in the repositories at all.

In my distrbution (OpenSuSE) they are in packages like glibc-devel-static , lapack-devel-static and similar.

The other option would be to compile the executable on a compatible distribution the users will have (GLIBC version is important) and supply all .so dynamically linked libraries they will need with your executable.

All of this assumes you use the same platform, like i586 or amd64 or arm like wallyk comments. I mostly assumed you are on a PC. You can force most compilers to produce a 32-bit or 64-bit executable by -m32 or -m64 option. You need the right version of the development libraries for that.