Apple Clang in Xcode 14 introduced a new feature for reducing the
overhead of objc_msgSend calls by deduplicating the setup calls for each
individual selector. This works by clang adding undefined symbols for
each selector called in a translation unit, such as `_objc_msgSend$foo`
for calling the `foo` method on any `NSObject`. There are 2
different modes for this behavior, the default directly does the setup
for `_objc_msgSend` and calls it, and the smaller option does the
selector setup, and then calls the standard `_objc_msgSend` stub
function.
The general overview of how this works is:
- Undefined symbols with the given prefix are collected
- The suffix of each matching undefined symbol is added as a string to
`__objc_methname`
- A pointer is added for every method name in the `__objc_selrefs`
section
- A `got` entry is emitted for `_objc_msgSend`
- Stubs are emitting pointing to the synthesized locations
Notes:
- Both `__objc_methname` and `__objc_selrefs` can also exist from object
files, so their contents are merged with our synthesized contents
- The compiler emits method names for defined methods, but not for
undefined symbols you call, but stubs are used for both
- This only implements the default "fast" mode currently just to reduce
the diff, I also doubt many folks will care to swap modes
- This only implements this for arm64 and x86_64, we don't need to
implement this for 32 bit iOS archs, but we should implement it for
watchOS archs in a later diff
Differential Revision: https://reviews.llvm.org/D128108
Keith Smiley