The Microsoft PE/COFF SPEC (v8, section 5.4.4) says that when a symbol has:
It's "value" field (in the symbol table) which "indicates the size".
This confuses me. In particular, I'm wondering "indicates the size of what?".
Generally, IMAGE_SYM_CLASS_EXTERNAL and IMAGE_SYM_UNDEFINED are used by CL(visual C++) to represent externs.
Why would the linker need to know, or care, about the symbol's size? Doesn't it just need to know a name, that it's an extern, and have the appropriate relocation entries set? None of this should depend on size. Now, admittedly, the compiler needs to know this, but it would get that information from a header file, not from an object file.
I've looked at some simple example externs compiled by CL, and the Value field always seems to be zero. So, it's clearly not being used to encode the size of the field.
Does anyone know what "size" the spec is referring to? Are their any scenarios where the visual studio linker might use that field, or is that blurb in the spec just nonsense? My limited brain is unable to think of any such scenarios.
Update:
Please note that it does not, at least not always, appear to be the size of the symbol. In the cases I've observed the VALUE IS ALWAYS 0, hence the question.
How about an extern declaration for an array that declares the size:
a.cpp:
extern int example[42];
b.cpp:
int example[13];
The fact that the linker doesn't catch this mismatch suggests however that Value isn't used. I have no easy way to see that.