Better watch out! D runs on watchOS!

Dan Olson via Digitalmars-d-announce digitalmars-d-announce at puremagic.com
Mon Dec 28 00:45:46 PST 2015


Joakim <dlang at joakim.fea.st> writes:
>
> I don't understand how the bitcode requirement works on your own
> device: I thought that was for an Apple-submitted app that they then
> compiled to binary themselves?  Do you have to go through the same
> process even for test apps, ie no sideloading?  Or does the device
> itself take bitcode?

This is all based on my experience and I don't know the full bitcode
story.  I may state erroneous info below.

The device takes normal executables but there is a check to make sure
that each object file has the appropriate bitcode sections. I think the
linker does this, but did not check which tool in build chain spit out
the error.

The bitcode is actually two new sections in every object file:

  .section __LLVM,__bitcode
  .section __LLVM,__cmdline

The __bitcode section seems to just be the LLVM IR for the object file
in the .bc binary format. Some sources say it is a xar archive but in my
investigation I used Apple's clang with -fembed-bitcode and inspected
the IR or ARM assembly to see these two sections. Extracting and using
llvm-dis on the __bitcode section gave back the containing module's
IR in human readable format. It exactly matches the LLVM IR for its
object file sans Apple's clang -fembed-bitcode.  So not sure when xar is
used yet.

The __cmdline section appears to be some of the clang options used to
compile the bitcode.

The compile process becomes something like this:
1. Create IR for module as usual.
2. Generate the IR bitcode representation.
3. Add the two new sections, using bitcode from (2) as contents of
  __bitcode section and __cmdline options to compile it
4. Generate object from IR.

But not wanting to figure all that out now, I tried simpler things and
discovered that at least for testing, these sections only need to be
present and the contents don't seem to matter. So for now I skip 2 and
just put a zero in each.

On implication of Apple requiring bitcode: if Apple is compiling the
bitcode with their clang or llc, then it means using a modifed LLVM like
I do to support thread-locals on watchOS, tvOS, or iOS is only good for
side loading.  Probably going to have to work on plan B for
thread-locals.
-- 
Dan


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