New comment by pervasif in "Bytecode VMs in surprising places (2024)"

pervasif — Mon, 25 May 2026 14:49:20 +0000

These little VMs in applications are everywhere. Apple Mach-O binaries have built in opcodes for binding and rebasing symbols interpreted by (numerous) little VMs in dyld:

https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/dyld/blob/e9da5ae...

Their use is less common now since the introduction of the mach-o load command LC_DYLD_CHAINED_FIXUPS, but these opcodes still have to be supported for older binaries. Also, some popular compilers including Zig still emit these opcodes for LC_DYLD_INFO and LC_DYLD_INFO_ONLY.

Hacker News: pervasif

New comment by pervasif in "Bytecode VMs in surprising places (2024)"