create_app crashes with 'Error: export ordinal too large: 73406' on Julia v1.10-rc1

[dustyirwin]

Hello, I am experiencing an error when attempting to run:

create_app("MyProj","MyProjCompiled", precompile_statements_file="precompile.jl", include_lazy_artifacts=false, incremental=false)

which eventually throws the error below on (what appears to be) one of the final steps of the compilation process:

... /.julia/artifacts/fdff308295487f361ef6e8dc2d27f5abe8a6eee9/mingw64/bin/../lib/gcc/x86_64-w64-mingw32/8.1.0/../../../../x86_64-w64-mingw32/bin/ld.exe: Error: export ordinal too large: 73406 collect2.exe: error: ld returned 1 exit status

I do not get this error when incremental=true and the process completes successfully. After some Googling, it appears this error has something to do with exporting too many symbols for a 32-bit Int. I don't know if this is related, but I was not getting this error before installing MSYS2 and Glade3 for Windows for some Gtk development related to this project....

Any ideas?

Julia Version 1.10.0-rc1
Commit 5aaa948543 (2023-11-03 07:44 UTC)
Build Info:
Official https://julialang.org/ release
Platform Info:
OS: Windows (x86_64-w64-mingw32)
CPU: 12 × Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8750H CPU @ 2.20GHz
WORD_SIZE: 64
LIBM: libopenlibm
LLVM: libLLVM-15.0.7 (ORCJIT, skylake)
Threads: 1 on 12 virtual cores

[PallHaraldsson]

it appears this error has something to do with exporting too many symbols for a 32-bit Int.

I'm not sure, the number 73406 obviously may come from Int32 or Int64, possibly more likely, but will not fit into UInt16:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/47135973/error-export-ordinal-too-large-104116

The maximum ordinal number is defined by the Microsoft PE and COFF format. It is a 16-bit integer with a maximum of 65535.

I don't know the workaround here, other than incremental=true. At least that always works until you have a really huge project? I think it's simply not possible to make huge EXE files, i.e. with many methods, then you need to split projects up into DLLs. etc.

I think it's just an inherent limitation of Windows .exe programs, and I'm not sure if there's a similar limitation for other platforms e.g. Linux too, ELF format. You could try to compile a Linux program, and those actually work in Windows under WSL2...

[dustyirwin]

Thanks for your response--UInt16 makes more sense :)

I'm targeting Windows for distribution since this is a gaming project using SimpleDirectMediaLayer.jl, but I may try compiling on Linux as a test. For the time being, I'll try trimming out any libs that aren't absolutely necessary.

[sairus7]

I have the same issue here trying to compile an app for Windows with CImGui and ImPlot deps. Didn't check if it compiles in previous versions.

[gbaraldi]

Could you try on 1.11, I'm curious if it makes a difference. There were some changes in and around this. You will also need a very new C compiler/binutils.

[sairus7]

What should I do for this test? Should I just add Julia 1.11-beta and update env with PackageCompiler? I'm confused with "very new C compiler/binutils" - what does that mean? Aren't all compilers already included in Julia binaries?

[gbaraldi]

Yeah so first thing I would do is the same workflow you were doing and hitting the error and do it with julia 1.11-beta. Though I think the compiler that PackageCompiler ships with windows is likely too old.