11.3 Dangers When Using Archives

The built-in rules for updating archives are incompatible with parallel builds. These rules (required by the POSIX standard) add each object file into the archive as it’s compiled. When parallel builds are enabled this allows multiple ar commands to be updating the same archive simultaneously, which is not supported.

If you want to use parallel builds with archives you can override the default rules by adding these lines to your makefile:

(%) : % ;
%.a : ; $(AR) $(ARFLAGS) $@ $?

The first line changes the rule that updates an individual object in the archive to do nothing, and the second line changes the default rule for building an archive to update all the outdated objects ($?) in one command.

Of course you will still need to declare the prerequisites of your library using the archive syntax:

libfoo.a: libfoo.a(x.o y.o …)

If you prefer to write an explicit rule you can use:

libfoo.a: libfoo.a(x.o y.o …)
        $(AR) $(ARFLAGS) $@ $?