[llvm-dev] [cfe-dev] [RFC] Open sourcing and contributing TAPI back to the LLVM community

[Juergen Ributzka via llvm-dev]

Sound great :)

On Wed, Oct 25, 2017 at 4:28 PM, Eric Christopher <echristo at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hi Juergen,
>
> At a minimum I think adding the support to libobject, etc so the various
> llvm tools can read or even write files from/for OSX should be fairly
> non-controversial so how about go ahead and do that first (I'll happily
> review if you'd like) and then we can go from there to do anything else
> with TAPI and llvm?
>
> Sound good?
>
> -eric
>
> On Thu, Sep 7, 2017 at 5:01 PM Juergen Ributzka via cfe-dev <
> cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
>
>> Hi @ll,
>>
>> Over the past years I have been looking into how to reduce the size of
>> the SDK that ships with Xcode and how to improve build times for the
>> overall OS inside Apple. The result is a tool called TAPI, which is used at
>> Apple for all things related to text-based dynamic library files (.tbd).
>>
>> *What are text-based dynamic library files?*
>> Text-based dynamic library files (TBDs) are a textual representation of
>> the information in a dynamic library / shared library that is required by
>> the static linker - basically a symbol list of the exported symbols.
>>
>> Apple’s SDKs originally used Mach-O Dynamic Library Stubs. Mach-O Dynamic
>> Library Stubs are dynamic library files, but with all the text and data
>> stripped out. TBD files were introduced to replaced Mach-O Dynamic Library
>> Stub files in the SDK to further reduce its overall size.
>>
>> Over time the TAPI tool has grown and is used now in a variety of ways.
>>
>> *Dynamic Library Stubbing:*
>> As mentioned above, TAPI is used to read the content of dynamic library /
>> shared library and generates a textual representation that can be used by
>> the static linker. The current implementation reads MachO files, but it
>> could be extended to also provide the same functionality for other object
>> file formats.
>>
>> *Framework / Dynamic Library Verification:*
>> The symbols that are exported from a dynamic library should ideally
>> match, or at least contain, all the API that is specified in the associated
>> header files. TAPI performs this verification by parsing the header files
>> with CLANG and compare the findings to the exported symbols from the
>> library.
>>
>> *InstallAPI:*
>> InstallAPI is a new build phase that generates the TBD file from header
>> files only. This allows a dependency of the library to build concurrently
>> even before the library has been built itself. This can be used to increase
>> parallelism in the build or larger projects or operating systems.
>>
>> *Misc:*
>> - display and operate on TBD files
>> - automatically generate API tests from header files
>> - libtapi, which is used by the linker (ld64) to parse the TBD files
>>
>>
>> The functionality of the tool is currently limited to Mach-O object
>> files, but that is not a technical limitation. In making the tool open
>> source I hope others will be able to take advantage of it too and extend
>> its functionality to other object file formats.
>>
>>
>> I initially developed the project as a CLANG project, but that was mostly
>> for practical reasons (out-of-tree development, separate repo, etc). For
>> the curious ones I pushed the repo to github (
>> https://github.com/ributzka/tapi).
>>
>> I imagine, for example, that the reading/writing of TBD files is
>> something that would fit better into the LLVM sources, which makes it
>> available to other libraries and tools (e.g. LLVMObject, llvm-nm, lld, ...).
>>
>> I created a small patch that integrates it with llvm-nm and LLVMObject.
>> This patch is not complete and I will split it up into smaller patches for
>> review. I am providing it as a reference to get the discussion started.
>>
>> Please let me know what you think and bikeshed away :)
>>
>> Thanks
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Juergen
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> cfe-dev mailing list
>> cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org
>> http://lists.llvm.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/cfe-dev
>>
>
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