cmd/link: temporary empty symbols are being stored in the ELF symbol table

[grantseltzer]

Please answer these questions before submitting your issue. Thanks!

What version of Go are you using (go version)?

go version go1.10.3 linux/amd64

Does this issue reproduce with the latest release?

Yes

What operating system and processor architecture are you using (go env)?

GOARCH="amd64"
GOBIN=""
GOCACHE="/home/grant/.cache/go-build"
GOEXE=""
GOHOSTARCH="amd64"
GOHOSTOS="linux"
GOOS="linux"
GOPATH="/home/grant/go"
GORACE=""
GOROOT="/usr/lib/golang"
GOTMPDIR=""
GOTOOLDIR="/usr/lib/golang/pkg/tool/linux_amd64"
GCCGO="gccgo"
CC="gcc"
CXX="g++"
CGO_ENABLED="1"
CGO_CFLAGS="-g -O2"
CGO_CPPFLAGS=""
CGO_CXXFLAGS="-g -O2"
CGO_FFLAGS="-g -O2"
CGO_LDFLAGS="-g -O2"
PKG_CONFIG="pkg-config"
GOGCCFLAGS="-fPIC -m64 -pthread -fmessage-length=0 -fdebug-prefix-map=/tmp/go-build731681085=/tmp/go-build -gno-record-gcc-switches"

What did you do?

I was doing disassembly related research and noticed that there's a whole bunch of empty symbols in the symbol table that seem to have been for temporary purposes. Things like: unicode.statictmp_103

gist of the go program and its output

What did you expect to see?

No temporary empty symbols being part of the compiled ELF symbol table

What did you see instead?

Temporary empty symbols being part of the compiled ELF symbol table

[odeke-em]

Kindly paging some linker folks @ianlancetaylor @heschik @thanm @aclements

[cherrymui]

What's the problem with 0-sized symbols? For a C program compiled with GCC, there are also a bunch of 0-sized symbols.

[grantseltzer]

@cherrymui 0-sized symbols isn't the issue, it's the temporary ones such as:

{Name:unicode.statictmp_111 Info:17 Other:0 Section:SHN_UNDEF+11 Value:5623968 Size:0}

I wasn't clear about that in the issue title/description. Updated.

[gopherbot]

Change https://golang.org/cl/142497 mentions this issue: cmd/compile,cmd/link: avoid collisions between statictmps and user vars

[gopherbot]

Change https://golang.org/cl/142577 mentions this issue: cmd/compile,cmd/link: remove statictmp variables from symbol table.