https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/26027#issuecomment-3571227050
tracked some bad performance in `DebugAllocator` on macOS down to a
function in dyld which `std.debug.SelfInfo` was calling into. It turns
out `dladdr`'s symbol lookup logic is horrendously slow (looking at its
source code, it appears to be doing a *linear scan* over all symbols in
the image?!). However, we don't actually need the symbol, so we want to
try and avoid this logic.
Luckily, dyld has more precise APIs for what we need! Unluckily, Apple,
in their infinite wisdom, decided they should be deprecated in favour of
`dladdr`, despite the latter being several times slower (and by "several
times", I have measured a 50x slowdown on repeated calls to `dladdr`
compared to the other API). But luckily again, the deprecated APIs are
still exposed.
So, after a careful analysis of the situation (reading dyld code and
cursing Apple engineers), I think it makes sense to just use these
deprecated APIs for now. If they ever go away, we can write our own
cache for this data to bypass Apple's awfully slow code, but I suspect
these functions will stick around for the foreseeable future.
Uh, and if `_dyld_get_image_header_containing_address` goes away,
there's also `dyld_image_header_containing_address`, which is a
seemingly identical function, exported by dyld just the same, but with a
separate (functionally identical) implementation, and not documented in
the public header file. Apple work in mysterious ways, I guess.
This is relevant to PIEs, which are notably enabled by default on macOS.
The build system needs to only see virtual addresses, that is, those
which do not have the slide applied; but the fuzzer itself naturally
sees relocated addresses (i.e. with the slide applied). We just need to
subtract the slide when we communicate addresses to the build system.
Like ELF, we now have `std.debug.MachOFile` for the host-independent
parts, and `std.debug.SelfInfo.MachO` for logic requiring the file to
correspond to the running program.
Andrew Kelley