d0e98909d2
Add the flag `--tail-merge-strings` to enable tail merging of cstrings.
For example, if we have strings `mystring\0` and `ring\0`, we could
place `mystring\0` at address `0x1000` and `ring\0` at address `0x1004`
and have them share the same underlying data.
It turns out that many ObjC method names can be tail merged. For
example, `error:` and `doFoo:error:`. On a large iOS binary, we saw
nearly a 15% size improvement in the `__TEXT__objc_methname` section and
negligible impact on link time.
```
$ bloaty --domain=vm merged.o.stripped -- base.o.stripped
VM SIZE
--------------
+95% +5.85Ki [__TEXT]
-2.4% -239Ki __TEXT,__cstring
-14.5% -710Ki __TEXT,__objc_methname
-1.0% -944Ki TOTAL
```
Tail merging for MachO was originally removed in
7c269db779.
The previous implementation used `StringTableBuilder`, but that was
removed in
4308f031cd
to ensure deduplicated strings are aligned correctly. This
implementation ensures that tail merged strings are also aligned
correctly.
Special thanks to nocchijiang for pointing this out in
https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/pull/158720#issuecomment-3310416030.
Depends on https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/pull/161253.
LLVM Linker (lld)
This directory and its subdirectories contain source code for the LLVM Linker, a modular cross platform linker which is built as part of the LLVM compiler infrastructure project.
lld is open source software. You may freely distribute it under the terms of the license agreement found in LICENSE.txt.
Benchmarking
In order to make sure various developers can evaluate patches over the same tests, we create a collection of self contained programs.
It is hosted at https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/linker-tests/lld-speed-test.tar.xz
The current sha256 is 10eec685463d5a8bbf08d77f4ca96282161d396c65bd97dc99dbde644a31610f.