Question

I am trying to learn and understand name mangling in C++. Here are some questions:

(1) From devx

When a global function is overloaded, the generated mangled name for each overloaded version is unique. Name mangling is also applied to variables. Thus, a local variable and a global variable with the same user-given name still get distinct mangled names.

Are there other examples that are using name mangling, besides overloading functions and same-name global and local variables ?

(2) From Wiki

The need arises where the language allows different entities to be named with the same identifier as long as they occupy a different namespace (where a namespace is typically defined by a module, class, or explicit namespace directive).

I don’t quite understand why name mangling is only applied to the cases when the identifiers belong to different namespaces, since overloading functions can be in the same namespace and same-name global and local variables can also be in the same space. How to understand this?

Do variables with same name but in different scopes also use name mangling?

(3) Does C have name mangling? If it does not, how can it deal with the case when some global and local variables have the same name? C does not have overloading functions, right?

Thanks and regards!

Answer 1

C does not do name mangling, though it does pre-pend an underscore to function names, so the printf(3) is actually _printf in the libc object.

In C++ the story is different. The history of it is that originally Stroustrup created “C with classes” or cfront, a compiler that would translate early C++ to C. Then rest of the tools – C compiler and linker would we used to produce object code. This implied that C++ names had to be translated to C names somehow. This is exactly what name mangling does. It provides a unique name for each class member and global/namespace function and variable, so namespace and class names (for resolution) and argument types (for overloading) are somehow included in the final linker names.

This is very easy to see with tools like nm(1) – compile your C++ source and look at the generated symbols. The following is on OSX with GCC:

namespace zoom
{
    void boom( const std::string& s )
    {
        throw std::runtime_error( s );
    }
}

~$ nm a.out | grep boom
0000000100001873 T __ZN4zoom4boomERKSs

In both C and C++ local (automatic) variables produce no symbols, but live in registers or on stack.

Edit:

Local variables do not have names in resulting object file for mere reason that linker does not need to know about them. So no name, no mangling. Everything else (that linker has to look at) is name-mangled in C++.