| 30 Nov 2025 |
 bake.monorail | I just managed to get ld64 from cctools-port to build. What's wrong with that? | 22:23:03 |
| bake.monorail | libtapi doesn't look like great code either, but I'd avoid frontloading rewriting code in order to be able to cross-compile for macOS. | 22:26:56 |
| 1 Dec 2025 |
|  matthewcroughan changed their profile picture. | 14:57:37 |
 Randy Eckenrode | LTO doesn’t work, and it uses sigtool for signing. sigtool doesn’t set the linker-signed flag, which causes tools like strip to break binaries because their aren’t updated. That flag makes them update automatically.
It also historically lagged behind Apple’s releases, but I think they got better about that.
| 15:56:23 |
| Randy Eckenrode | Darwin used to use cctools-port, but it moved away from it due to the LTO and update issue. The code-signing problem was discovered later. | 15:57:18 |
| Randy Eckenrode | Darwin also mostly doesn’t use cctools anymore. For 26.06, I plan to drop it completely from the Darwin bintools. It will just be LLVM bintools. | 15:58:10 |
| Randy Eckenrode | https://github.com/reckenrode/ld64 is the fork of ld64 that nixpkgs uses. https://github.com/reckenrode/ld64/tree/ld64-954.16-nixpkgs is the source of the patches. | 15:58:56 |
| Randy Eckenrode | Note that libtapi is still packaged even though ld64 vendors a reduced version. | 16:00:13 |
| Randy Eckenrode | My recommendation though would be to use LLVM’s bintools and LLD. | 16:00:33 |
| bake.monorail |
LTO doesn’t work, and it uses sigtool for signing. sigtool doesn’t set the linker-signed flag, which causes tools like strip to break binaries because their aren’t updated. That flag makes them update automatically.
I see, these don't seem to be dealbreaker to start getting some stuff to cross-compile though. If you intend to have a drop-in replacement, it can be adopted.
For 26.06, I plan to drop it completely from the Darwin bintools. It will just be LLVM bintools.
Does this mean adopting lld as a linker? That would be the best option for cross-compiling as well, but it's unclear to me if there's something that requires ld64 🤔.
| 16:01:16 |
| bake.monorail | *
LTO doesn’t work, and it uses sigtool for signing. sigtool doesn’t set the linker-signed flag, which causes tools like strip to break binaries because their aren’t updated. That flag makes them update automatically.
I see, these don't seem to be dealbreaker to start getting some stuff to cross-compile though. If you intend to have a drop-in replacement, it can be adopted later on.
For 26.06, I plan to drop it completely from the Darwin bintools. It will just be LLVM bintools.
Does this mean adopting lld as a linker? That would be the best option for cross-compiling as well, but it's unclear to me if there's something that requires ld64 🤔.
| 16:02:29 |
| Randy Eckenrode | Anything that uses strip or install_name_tool will break the signature. | 16:03:36 |
| Randy Eckenrode | There used to be wrappers to work around cctools’s limitations, but those were removed. | 16:04:24 |
| Randy Eckenrode | * | 16:04:46 |
| Randy Eckenrode | The issue with LLD is that it doesn’t support some flags required for compatibility with Xcode projects. It also was missing some features, but I haven’t checked on it in a while. | 16:07:34 |
