Advanced Mac OS X Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide

Name Mangling

C++ uses name mangling for doing typesafe linking. The compiler encodes type information in a function’s name, which can lead to unreadable error messages or indecipherable output from Unix tools like nm You might be poking around an object file and see something like this:

$​ ​n​m​ ​s​l​i​d​e​m​a​s​t​e​r​.​o​
.​.​.​
0​0​0​0​0​0​3​0​ ​s​ ​E​H​_​f​r​a​m​e​1​
 ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​U​ ​_​_​Z​N​1​2​B​i​g​N​e​r​d​R​a​n​c​h​7​B​i​g​S​h​o​w​5​S​l​i​d​e​1​3​D​i​s​p​l​a​y​I​n​V​i​e​w​E​P​7​B​i​g​V​i​e​w​
 ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​U​ ​_​_​_​g​x​x​_​p​e​r​s​o​n​a​l​i​t​y​_​v​0​
.​.​.​

That "__ZN12BigNerdRanch..." symbol looks interesting. Here it is made human readable:

$​ ​c​+​+​f​i​l​t​ ​_​_​Z​N​1​2​B​i​g​N​e​r​d​R​a​n​c​h​7​B​i​g​S​h​o​w​5​S​l​i​d​e​1​3​D​i​s​p​l​a​y​I​n​V​i​e​w​E​P​7​B​i​g​V​i​e​w​ ...