Question

In our iPhone XCode 3.2.1 project, we’re linking in 2 external static C++ libraries, libBlue.a and libGreen.a. libBlue.a globally overrides the “new” operator for it’s own memory management. However, when we build our project, libGreen.a winds up using libBlue’s new operator, which results in a crash (presumably because libBlue.a is making assumptions about the kinds of structures being allocated). Both libBlue.a and libGreen.a are provided by 3rd parties, so we can’t change any of their source code or build options.

When we remove libBlue.a from the project, libGreen.a doesn’t have any issues. However, no amount of shuffling the linking order of the libraries seems to fix the problem, nor does any experimentation with the various linking flags. Is there some way to tell XCode to tell the linker to “have libGreen’s use of the new operator use the standard C++ new operator rather than the one redefined by libBlue”?

Answer 1

Perhaps you could investigate using GNU objcopy, something along the lines of objcopy --redefine-sym oldNew=newNew libBlue.a. The biggest problem I see with this is that Apple’s developer tool suite doesn’t seem to include objcopy. You can install objcopy from MacPorts (sudo port install binutils), but that objcopy probably can’t manipulate ARM object files. There are a couple of ARM binutils in MacPorts, and I’m guessing arm-elf-binutils is your best bet.

Barring that, you could possibly disassemble libBlue.a, rename its new operator with a sed script, then reassemble it. Perhaps you could even manipulate the libBlue.a symbol table directly.