ld64 vs LLD-MachO

This doc lists all significant deliberate differences in behavior between ld64 and LLD-MachO.

Dead Stripping Duplicate Symbols

ld64 strips dead code before reporting duplicate symbols. By default, LLD does the opposite. ld64’s behavior hides ODR violations, so we have chosen not to follow it. But, to make adoption easy, LLD can mimic this behavior via the --dead-strip-duplicates flag. Usage of this flag is discouraged, and this behavior should be fixed in the source. However, for sources that are not within the user’s control, this will mitigate users for adoption.

-no_deduplicate Flag

  • ld64: This turns off ICF (deduplication pass) in the linker.

  • LLD: This turns off ICF and string merging in the linker.

String Alignment

LLD is slightly less conservative about aligning cstrings, allowing it to pack them more compactly. This should not result in any meaningful semantic difference.

ObjC Symbols Treatment

There are differences in how LLD and ld64 handle ObjC symbols loaded from archives.

  • ld64:

    1. Duplicate ObjC symbols from the same archives will not raise an error. ld64 will pick the first one.

    2. Duplicate ObjC symbols from different archives will raise a “duplicate symbol” error.

  • LLD: Duplicate symbols, regardless of which archives they are from, will raise errors.

Aliases

ld64 treats all aliases as strong extern definitions. Having two aliases of the same name, or an alias plus a regular extern symbol of the same name, both result in duplicate symbol errors. LLD does not check for duplicate aliases; instead we perform alias resolution first, and only then do we check for duplicate symbols. In particular, we will not report a duplicate symbol error if the aliased symbols turn out to be weak definitions, but ld64 will.

ZERO_AR_DATE enabled by default

ld64 has a special mode where it sets some stabs modification times to 0 for hermetic builds, enabled by setting any value for the ZERO_AR_DATE environment variable. LLD flips this default to prefer hermetic builds, but allows disabling this behavior by setting ZERO_AR_DATE=0. Any other value of ZERO_AR_DATE will be ignored.