[llvm-dev] Wildcard patterns in `--undefined` linker option

[Rui Ueyama via llvm-dev]

On Tue, Jun 11, 2019 at 10:54 PM Peter Smith <peter.smith at linaro.org> wrote:

> On Tue, 11 Jun 2019 at 14:31, Rui Ueyama via llvm-dev
> <llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
> >
> > Hi,
> >
> > I got a feature request from an internal customer of lld, but I don't
> know whether we should implement it or not, so I'd like to get opinions
> from people on this mailing list.
> >
> > The feature request is to allow wildcard patterns in the `--undefined`
> option. `--undefined foo` (or `-u foo` for short) makes the linker to pull
> out an object file from a static library if the file defines symbol foo.
> So, by allowing wildcard patterns, you can pull out all object files
> defining some JNI symbols (which start with "Java_") from static archives
> by specifying `-u "Java_*"`, for example.
> >
> > This seems mildly useful to me, but it comes with a cost. Currently,
> `-u` is literally as fast as a single hash lookup. If you allow wildcard
> patterns in `-u`, you have to attempt a wildcard pattern match against all
> symbols in the symbol table, which can be expensive.
> >
> > I'm also not sure how useful it will actually be. The above JNI case is
> somewhat convincing, but that's just one use case, and if there's only one
> use case, adding a new feature for that particular case is probably not a
> very good idea.
> >
> > Does anyone have any opinion on whether we should support this or not?
> >
>
> Arm's proprietary linker supported a similar wildcard feature for the
> various section and symbol commands. My opinion was that it was very
> useful for a small number of cases. Usually where a customer's set of
> symbols to operate on was changing frequently during development and
> with a simple naming convention and a wildcard they could save quite a
> bit of effort. Their alternative was to either manually maintain the
> list of symbols or write a tool to generate it.
>

Thank you for the info. Does the ARM proprietary linker support `*`? Is
there any way to escape `*`? I think `*` is not usually used in a symbol
name, so treating `*` as a metacharacter should be fine, but I'm wondering
how the ARM linker works.

We went down the approach of a fast path when there where no wildcards
> and a slow path when there was. Aside from the check that there was a
> wildcard it wasn't too much extra overhead for the fast path.
>

That's true. The usual use case won't be penalized by adding a wildcard
support.


> Peter
>
> > Thanks,
> > Rui
> > _______________________________________________
> > LLVM Developers mailing list
> > llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org
> > https://lists.llvm.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/llvm-dev
>
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