[LLVMdev] Linking with C Library

[Maxime Chevalier-Boisvert]

I tried running nm - D | grep "puts" on the binary compiled by the OCaml 
compiler. It outputs the following:

08161b00 T camlRuntime__rt_fputs_208
08161a20 T camlRuntime__rt_puts_198
         U fputs

I'm assuming this means that fputs is linked dynamically, and puts is 
not. I tried modifying my code to use fputs instead of puts instead, but 
had no success, however, I still get:

LLVM ERROR: Tried to execute an unknown external function: i32 (i8*, 
i32)* fputs

There has to be some way of telling LLVM to get some symbols 
dynamically. What's rather frustrating is that the OCaml LLVM tutorial 
seems to be doing exactly what I want:

http://llvm.org/docs/tutorial/OCamlLangImpl4.html

They define some "extern" functions by using "declare function", which 
are then linked dynamically by the JIT. Unfortunately, this is already 
what I'm doing, and I can't seem to spot what they are doing differently!

- Maxime

Jeffrey Yasskin wrote:
> In C, on Linux, you would have to link your JIT compiler with
> -rdynamic or -Wl,-export-dynamic (they're synonyms). I'm not sure what
> the equivalent linker flag is for OCaml.
>
> You can see what symbols are available to the JIT with `nm -D`.
>
> On Sun, Apr 4, 2010 at 8:41 AM, Nyx <mcheva at cs.mcgill.ca> wrote:
>   
>> I'm coding a JIT compiler for C source in OCaml, using LLVM. I'm pretty much
>> done with the LLVM code generation. The problem is that I can't seem to call
>> C library functions. I was told that all I needed to do to be able to link
>> with libc functions was to declare them in my module and give them external
>> linkage, but this does not seem to work. Please note that this is a JIT
>> compiler. I am not generating a binary, but running the code generated in
>> memory. It should be possible to dynamically link with the libc functions
>> because the ocaml executable is linked with them.
>>
>> The three libc functions I declared appear in my module dump as such:
>> declare i8* @malloc(i32)
>> declare void @free(i8*)
>> declare i32 @puts(i8*)
>>
>> However, when trying to run my program, I get the following:
>> LLVM ERROR: Tried to execute an unknown external function: i32 (i8*)* puts
>>
>> I'm not quite sure how to go about this. Any help would be appreciated.
>>
>> - Maxime
>>