[dmd-internals] How to avoid 4-word padding for symbols?

[Walter Bright]

Michel Fortin wrote:
> Turns out it doesn't work because those symbols refer to each other, so by coalescing them in one symbol I'm creating a self-referenced symbol and the backend doesn't like that.
>
> I resorted to adding a 'noalign' flag to outdata() in the backend. It's a small change and it works, but it feels like a hack. Ideally there should be a way to specify the alignment per segment (there might already be one, but I can't figure it out). Since the Objective-C stuff belongs to separate segments it'd make things really easy.
>
> I know there is the 'align' parameter in mach_getsegment(), but it doesn't seem to have any effect other than changing alignment value for the section in the object file.
>   

Do you mean alignment per segment, or per symbol?

>
> Le 2010-11-07 à 21:05, Walter Bright a écrit :
>
>   
>> Symbols are aligned when written out to the data segment.
>>
>> To defeat the alignment, symbols that should be adjacent should be merged into one symbol.
>>
>> Michel Fortin wrote:
>>     
>>> It's probably a small thing that I'm missing, but I have a small problem where the code below causes undesired padding to be added between two symbols in the object file. This code writes 5 words to the object file:
>>>
>>>    symbol = symbol_name(sname, SCstatic, type_fake(TYnptr));
>>>    symbol->Sdt = dt;
>>>    symbol->Sseg = objc_getsegment(SEGprotocol);
>>>    outdata(symbol);
>>>
>>> If you call it 2 times, it generates 5*2 + 3 padding bytes between the two (added dashes to show padding):
>>>
>>> [25] 002d2 0034 000da6    0 0f94   2 10000000 00 00 __protocol __OBJC
>>> 0000:   0  0  0  0  6  3  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0   ................
>>> 0010:   0  0  0  0 -0--0--0--0--0--0--0--0--0--0--0--0   ................
>>> 0020:   0  0  0  0 36  3  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0   ....6...........
>>> 0030:   0  0  0  0                     ....            
>>> This padding is causing a crash when starting the Objective-C runtime because it expects the two to be contiguous.
>>>
>>> What needs to be changed to remove this padding?
>>>
>>>  
>>>       
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>
>