On Jan 13, 2020, at 5:52 PM, Yusuke Suzuki <ysuzuki@apple.com> wrote:
We can purge type-encoding-string if we use Objective-C NS_DIRECT feature (which makes Objective-C function as C function calling convention, removing metadata). However, this does not work universally: with NS_DIRECT, Objective-C override does not work. This means we need to be extra-careful when using it.
Yes, we need to be careful, but NS_DIRECT is likely to have more benefit than just binary shrinking, and it should do even more binary shrinking than hiding types from Objective-C. Use of NS_DIRECT will likely help performance, sometimes in a measurable way. However, besides the risk of making something “non-overridable”, I think it’s only available in new versions of the clang compiler.
So, as a simple, but effective work-around, in the above patch, we introduced NakedRef<T> / NakedPtr<T>. This is basically raw pointer / raw reference to T, with a wrapper class. This leverages the behavior of Objective-C compiler’s mechanism “one-level deep type information collection”. Since NakedRef<T> / NakedPtr<T> introduces one-level deep field, Objective-C compiler does not collect the type information of T if NakedPtr<T> is included in the fields / signatures, while the compiler collects information when T* is used.
Very exciting. Does this cover all the cases we care about? Does come up for types that are not references or pointers? Maybe we can pass arguments by const reference? What about return values?
## Future work
We would like to avoid including such types accidentally in Objective-C. We should introduce build-time hook script which detects such a thing. I uploaded the PoC script in https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=205968 <https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=205968>, and I’m personally planning to introduce such a hook into a part of build process.
Beautiful. Well worth doing. Thanks! — Darin