Re: [PATCH v1] perf symbol: Add rust v0 demangling support

[Namhyung Kim <namhyung@kernel.org>]

Hello,

On Mon, Feb 03, 2025 at 09:20:30AM -0800, Ian Rogers wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 30, 2025 at 11:35 AM Daniel Xu <dxu@dxuuu.xyz> wrote:
> >
> > Hi Ian,
> >
> > Thanks so much for working on this!
> >
> > Only did a quick skim. Seems like it'd be nice to reuse the official
> > demangler now that we know about it. Will be interesting to
> > see how that gets packaged for distros.
> 
> I think the best solution is to use the official demangler but in
> general we'd like fewer rather than more library dependencies. For
> example your initial comments were to work to make the coupling with
> capstone and LLVM disassemblers more loose via dlopen:
> https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20250122174308.350350-1-irogers@google.com/
> 
> Thinking through the options (note I'm not doing Rust things and so my
> level of skin in the game is minimal):
> 1) stay as we are - well this is a mess as there is no v0 support and
> the legacy support comes from libbfd/libiberty.
> 2) option (1) plus this change cleaned up - there's still the mess
> with the legacy support, which is probably more important given v0
> isn't widely adopted.
> 3) wait for the official demangler to be packaged as a library and
> depend upon it, add testing from here - solves legacy and v0 issues,
> but brings in an extra library dependency to the build. Timeline not
> clear.
> 4) "contribute"/copy-paste the official demangler into perf tree and
> do like (3). Perhaps remove the forked file when a dependable library
> exists (there's some precedent for this with how libtraceevent was in
> and then removed from the linux tree) - solves the timeline, not great
> to fork the official demangler, so far not heard from the author Ariel
> Ben-Yehuda and I would strongly prefer they contribute rather than I
> copy-paste it.

Agreed.  I'm hesitant to add this change to perf code base without
commitment of the Rust community.

Thanks,
Namhyung

> 
> For (3) and (4) it is probably a good idea to engage the Rust folks in:
> https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/60705
> 
> Having broken Rust demangling seems like a high priority issue for the
> perf tool.