[LLVMdev] Linking with C Library

[Jeffrey Yasskin]

On Sun, Apr 4, 2010 at 5:24 PM, Maxime Chevalier-Boisvert
<mcheva at cs.mcgill.ca> wrote:
> 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.

Don't assume; ask `man nm`.
http://www.linuxcommand.org/man_pages/nm1.html says that a 'U' in that
column means "The symbol is undefined." (It's there so the dynamic
loader knows to pull it out of a .so, I think.)

You need to figure out how to pass -rdynamic to the linker, like I
said before. http://llvm.org/docs/tutorial/OCamlLangImpl7.html
mentions it, but I don't know enough about the ocaml build process to
say whether that'll work.

> 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
>>>
>
>