gas on Mac OS X

Ian Lance Taylor ian@wasabisystems.com
Wed Apr 21 16:44:00 GMT 2004


Martin Schaffner <schaffner@gmx.li> writes:

Thanks for working on this.  I wish we could call the files macho
instead of mach-o, but I guess that has a pronunciation problem.

> * Indirect symbols. Mach-O supports so called "indirect symbols",
> which  are something different than the indirect symbols of ELF. Is
> there a  terminology to distinguish these two concepts? Maybe in gcc?
> We could  call the ones in Mach-o "mach-o-indirect symbols"...
> Anyway, to support these there has to be an interface between bfd and
> gas. This design has to be carefully thought out. Maybe someone can
> help me.

Could you describe what Mach-O indirect symbols are?

Note that as far as I know ELF does not have indirect symbols.  BFD
supports indirect symbols because they are a GNU extension to the
a.out object file format, essentially another of way of solving the
problem which ELF weak defined symbols solve.  The ELF backend linker
then uses BFD indirect symbols as part of the implementation of ELF
versioned symbols.

> * Weak references. These too are not the same thing as ELF's weak
> symbols.

Are they the same as ELF weak undefined symbols, though?

Ian



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