What is __start___minfo?

[Joakim]

On Wednesday, 14 March 2018 at 06:32:43 UTC, Elronnd wrote:
> I'm trying to get programs run under ldc to run under lli.  It 
> would always give me a message about missing __start___minfo, 
> even when I told it to load shared libs.  I thought that might 
> change with 1.8 giving the option to always link shared 
> versions of phobos/druntime, but the same error pops up:
>
> $ lli --load=/usr/lib/libphobos2-ldc-shared.so.78 
> --load=/usr/lib/libdruntime-ldc-shared.so.78 test2.bc
> LLVM ERROR: Program used external function '__start___minfo' 
> which could not be resolved!
>
> From 
> https://github.com/ldc-developers/ldc/blob/master/gen/modules.cpp#L379, it appears to be used for metadata of modules?  Not sure why it wouldn't end up in bitcode or why it wouldn't be accessible, but how can I get it?
>
> I don't think that it's in an object file getting linked in 
> because the linker command line is:
>
> /usr/bin/gcc test2.o -o test2 -Xlinker 
> --no-warn-search-mismatch -L/usr/lib 
> -L/usr/lib/clang/5.0.1/lib/linux/ -lphobos2-ldc-shared 
> -ldruntime-ldc-shared -Wl,--gc-sections -lrt -ldl -lpthread -lm 
> -m64
>
> Which doesn't seem to have anything in (beyond phobos/drt, 
> which I'm already loading with lli) that would contain a 
> __start___minfo.

As noted in the comment you linked, it's a magic linker symbol.  
The linker normally adds the __start__minfo and __stop__minfo 
symbols to the __minfo section, along with similar delimiters for 
other sections, to allow code to access the beginning and end of 
the sections.  That accounts for how they're normally added, but 
I'm unsure of how they're normally accessed by D code, ie where 
they're required such that lli looks for them.

Your interpreter may need to account for the fact that those are 
normally added by the linker, or you could try to take out where 
they're being required in D code.