[swift-dev] Magic Metadata Symbol In Stubs

[Alexis]

I’m currently looking at pushing the storage of the empty Dictionary singleton into rodata, using Array as a reference. Most things are pretty straightforward, except the symbol for the metadata for _EmptyArrayStorage that’s hardcoded in GlobalObjects.cpp: 

extern "C" ClassMetadata _TMCs18_EmptyArrayStorage;

How was the _TMCs18 mangle discovered? Does anything need to be done to ensure this is stable? Blindly applying that prefix to the Dictionary class sadly just leads to a linker error. For reference, the current decl for Dictionary is (after gyb expansion):

@objc_non_lazy_realization
internal class _RawNativeDictionaryStorage:
  _SwiftNativeNSDictionary, _NSDictionaryCore

Related: is it completely busted that GlobalObjects.[h/cpp] is blatantly assuming the layout  of _EmptyArrayStorage? The doesn’t seem to be any @_fixed_layout annotation on it or its base classes.