A Linking Adventure | Hacker News Reader

A Linking Adventure

nsnotes.github.io

65 pointsxnhuaj12 comments

Also worth noting that you should be able get the binary close to 2KB if you pass some other options.

https://github.com/lpsantil/rt0/blob/master/STATS.md

https://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/software/tiny/teensy.ht...

There are a variety of flags for making executables smaller. How do those compare to manually supplying _start?

glibc’s pre-main code is still far larger even with optimized flags. It’s at least a couple KB of disk. You can see the flags I used. I think only ‘-nostdlib’ has to be removed. Some of the code & data glibc adds has purpose (like TLS (thread level storage) bits).

https://github.com/lpsantil/rt0/blob/master/STATS.md

Why wouldn’t main contain the _Start_ point when you do gcc -c?

The _start symbol is the symbol to which the OS transfers control to a userspace program. The ABI of this function call is not the same ABI as a C function, so there's necessary code to translate those functions to main. Additionally, there's a decent amount of stuff that has to be done in main before you run _start, mainly running static constructors, and there's stuff that has to be done after main.

This code is provided by the C runtime. If you use gcc as the linker, the necessary object files to include _start are included in the link line. But when you drive the linker manually, you have to provide those libraries yourself.

Perfect

(Author here) Thanks for explaining this more succinctly than I can :)

Just one nitpick:

> decent amount of stuff that has to be done in main before you run _start

should read

> decent amount of stuff that has to be done in _start before you run main

Analogously, cleanup code like running global destructors usually happens in _start/CRT after main returns, but I skipped that in the post for the sake of brevity.

I’d also argue

   > decent amount of stuff that CAN be done in _start before you run main

It’s all optional. Before I found the Linux kernel’s nolibc [0], I wrote a minimal C runtime based on bunch of stuff I read [1]. Only thing you really need to do is align the stack (at least on x86, amd64). You don’t get argc/argv/envp but main will still work.

[0] https://github.com/torvalds/linux/tree/master/tools/include/...

[1] https://github.com/lpsantil/rt0/blob/master/src/lib/00_start...

Generally this is either libc setup stuff, or things to support static initialization.

Recently there is a very bad trend in dev tools that IDEs etc. tend to hide as many details as possible. Unfortunately, some of those details are vital to understand how things work in the first place. The latest example is in dotnet6, Main method is now by default synthetized. Kinda off topic though.

"recently" ?! They have been this way since I first encountered them in the mid 90s.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com