SmartLink is what keeps the iOS symbols

[jcant0n]

iOS links with -dead_strip. ForceLoad pulls every member of the archive in and the strip takes back out whatever nothing references — and nothing does: these entry points are reached from managed code at run time, which the linker cannot see. The archive arrived, the executable grew from 30 MB to 32, and cesium_async_system_create was not defined in it.

SmartLink has the SDK read the assembly's P/Invokes and pass -u for each, naming them as roots the strip has to keep.

Proved before changing anything here

A single -u flag passed by hand from the smoke project:

executable:               45 MB   (was 32)
cesium_ symbols by type:  175 T,  91 t,  31 s
the one under test:       00000001005edc7c T _cesium_async_system_create

175 defined globals — exactly the number of functions the generator emits.

The check is the more useful half of this

It used to grep nm -U for the name. A name matches whether the symbol is a definition or an unresolved reference, so the count sat at 297 across three rounds while the thing underneath changed completely — from U references to T definitions. That is why two rounds were spent reading an aggregate that could not answer the question.

It now prints the type histogram and requires a T.

ForceLoad stays on: it is what puts the members within reach at all, and it is safe now that CesiumC#19 stopped merging libjpeg.a beside libturbojpeg.a.

[github-actions]

API gate: additive

Every symbol that existed still exists, unchanged. Nothing that compiled before stops compiling.

Target framework	Added	Removed
net10.0-ios	+0	-0
net10.0	+0	-0

_{Enum and constant values are part of the measured surface: a renumbering keeps compiling and sends the wrong number to the driver, so it counts as a removal.}