Possibility of compiling static libraries with the cli

[victorChB]

I was wondering if it's possible to compile a static library (.a) with the arduino-cli and specify the SDK I want to use (e.g. avr, esp32, due,etc).

My current use case is the following:

I have a library for Arduino which will be built for different platforms and distributed as a static lib, which in the library.properties file is set with precompiled=true. Since the library is targeted for Arduino I am using the Arduino SDK of each platform. This brings me to the case where I need to include the core libraries for each platform, compiler flags, toolchain, etc. As I understand the arduino-cli detects the installed toolchains and one can select the platform for which the Sketch will be compiled. In my case I would like to make the compiled objects into a static lib instead of an hex,elf or bin.

I currently use the Arduino-Cmake-toolchain where I can specify which SDK I want to use (esp32,avr,due,nano,etc) and then it parses the platforms.txt and boards.txt file to allow me to use the specific toolchain and compiler flags. Afterward, I have a pipeline that creates a new build for each target with CMake, and voila I have all the static libraries for each platform/cpu which I then use with a script to create the library for Arduino according to its specification.

If its not possible at the moment I was wondering if this will be in the roadmap of the project?

[silvanocerza]

Nope, it's not on our roadmap but it's certainly an interesting use case. I'll leave this open for future references and to keep track any future work that might happen.