Linker reorganization

Edward Z. Yang ezyang at mit.edu
Fri Oct 28 01:40:56 UTC 2016


Great work! We've been mumbling about it for a while, good
to see it actually done.

Edward

Excerpts from Ben Gamari's message of 2016-10-27 21:33:14 -0400:
> Hello RTS people,
> 
> Today I finally grew frustrated enough with my constant battle with the
> 7000 line tangle of CPP that is rts/Linker.c to do something about it.
> The result is D2643 through D2650. In short, I took the file and chopped
> it into more managable pieces:
> 
>  * linker/PEi386.[ch]:       PE loading
>  * linker/MachO.[ch]:        MachO loading
>  * linker/Elf.[ch]:          ELF loading
>  * linker/CacheFlush.[ch]:   Platform-specific icache flushing logic
>  * linker/SymbolExtras.[ch]: Symbol extras support logic
>  * Linker.c:                 Everything necessary to glue all of the above together
>  * LinkerInternals.h:        Declarations shared by the above and
>                              declarations for Linker.c
> 
> For the most part this involved just shuffling code around since there
> was some rough platform abstraction already in place. In fact, I tried
> quite hard to avoid performing any more intricate refactoring to keep
> the scope of the project in check. Consequently, this is only a start
> and the design is in places a bit awkward; there is still certainly no
> shortage of work remaining to be done. Regardless, I think this change
> an improvement over the current state of affairs.
> 
> One concern that I have is that the RTS's header file structure (where
> everything is #include'd via Rts.h) doesn't work very well for this
> particular use, where we have a group of headers specific to a
> particular subsystem (e.g. linker/*.h). Consequently, these header files
> currently lack enclosing `extern "C"` blocks (as well as
> Begin/EndPrivate blocks). It would be easy to add these, but I was
> curious to hear if others had any better ideas.
> 
> The refactoring was performed over several small-ish commits, so review
> shouldn't be so bad. I expect to rebase the LoadArchive.c refactoring
> performed in D2642 on top of this set once it has been merged. I will
> also offer to rebase DemiMarie's recent error-handling patch (D2652).
> 
> I have tested the set on a variety of platforms,
> 
>  * x86-64 Linux
>  * x86-64 Darwin
>  * x86-64 FreeBSD
>  * x86-64 Windows
>  * ARM Linux
> 
> What do you think?
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> - Ben


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