Name mangling

Common card · No. 410792

In compiler construction, name mangling (also called name decoration) is a technique used to solve various problems caused by the need to resolve unique names for programming entities in many modern programming languages. It provides means to encode added information in the name of a function, structure, class or another data type, to pass more semantic information from the compiler to the linker. The need for name mangling arises where a language allows different entities to be named with the same identifier as long as they occupy a different namespace (typically defined by a module, class, or explicit namespace directive) or have different type signatures (such as in function overloading). It is required in these uses because each signature might require different, specialized calling convention in the machine code. Any object code produced by compilers is usually linked with other pieces of object code (produced by the same or another compiler) by a type of program called a linker. The...

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