Dual emission of constructor symbols

Question

Today, I discovered a rather interesting thing about either g++ or nm...constructor definitions appear to have two entries in libraries.

I have a header thing.hpp:

class Thing
{
    Thing();

    Thing(int x);

    void foo();
};

And thing.cpp:

#include "thing.hpp"

Thing::Thing()
{ }

Thing::Thing(int x)
{ }

void Thing::foo()
{ }

I compile this with:

g++ thing.cpp -c -o libthing.a

Then, I run nm on it:

%> nm -gC libthing.a
0000000000000030 T Thing::foo()
0000000000000022 T Thing::Thing(int)
000000000000000a T Thing::Thing()
0000000000000014 T Thing::Thing(int)
0000000000000000 T Thing::Thing()
                 U __gxx_personality_v0

As you can see, both of the constructors for Thing are listed with two entries in the generated static library. My g++ is 4.4.3, but the same behavior happens in clang, so it isn't just a gcc issue.

This doesn't cause any apparent problems, but I was wondering:

Why are defined constructors listed twice?
Why doesn't this cause "multiple definition of symbol __" problems?

EDIT: For Carl, the output without the C argument:

%> nm -g libthing.a
0000000000000030 T _ZN5Thing3fooEv
0000000000000022 T _ZN5ThingC1Ei
000000000000000a T _ZN5ThingC1Ev
0000000000000014 T _ZN5ThingC2Ei
0000000000000000 T _ZN5ThingC2Ev
                 U __gxx_personality_v0

As you can see...the same function is generating multiple symbols, which is still quite curious.

And while we're at it, here is a section of generated assembly:

.globl _ZN5ThingC2Ev
        .type   _ZN5ThingC2Ev, @function
_ZN5ThingC2Ev:
.LFB1:
        .cfi_startproc
        .cfi_personality 0x3,__gxx_personality_v0
        pushq   %rbp
        .cfi_def_cfa_offset 16
        movq    %rsp, %rbp
        .cfi_offset 6, -16
        .cfi_def_cfa_register 6
        movq    %rdi, -8(%rbp)
        leave
        ret
        .cfi_endproc
.LFE1:
        .size   _ZN5ThingC2Ev, .-_ZN5ThingC2Ev
        .align 2
.globl _ZN5ThingC1Ev
        .type   _ZN5ThingC1Ev, @function
_ZN5ThingC1Ev:
.LFB2:
        .cfi_startproc
        .cfi_personality 0x3,__gxx_personality_v0
        pushq   %rbp
        .cfi_def_cfa_offset 16
        movq    %rsp, %rbp
        .cfi_offset 6, -16
        .cfi_def_cfa_register 6
        movq    %rdi, -8(%rbp)
        leave
        ret
        .cfi_endproc

So the generated code is...well...the same.

EDIT: To see what constructor actually gets called, I changed Thing::foo() to this:

void Thing::foo()
{
    Thing t;
}

The generated assembly is:

.globl _ZN5Thing3fooEv
        .type   _ZN5Thing3fooEv, @function
_ZN5Thing3fooEv:
.LFB550:
        .cfi_startproc
        .cfi_personality 0x3,__gxx_personality_v0
        pushq   %rbp
        .cfi_def_cfa_offset 16
        movq    %rsp, %rbp
        .cfi_offset 6, -16
        .cfi_def_cfa_register 6
        subq    $48, %rsp
        movq    %rdi, -40(%rbp)
        leaq    -32(%rbp), %rax
        movq    %rax, %rdi
        call    _ZN5ThingC1Ev
        leaq    -32(%rbp), %rax
        movq    %rax, %rdi
        call    _ZN5ThingD1Ev
        leave
        ret
        .cfi_endproc

So it is invoking the complete object constructor.

Dual emission of constructor symbols

1 Answers