LLVM 21 bump broke defmt strings containing escaped double-quotes

[jonathanpallant]

The defmt crate does deferred formatting. It does this by turning defmt::info!("Hello!") into a static SYMBOL: u8 with the name {"package":"firmware","tag":"defmt_info","data":"Hello","disambiguator":"16563080428635778541","crate_name":"log"}. Yes, we emit symbol names that are JSON - the GNU linker for our targets of interest doesn't mind.

However, as of nightly rust, this is broken.

A cargo bisect-rustc lays the blame at dc0bae1db725fbba8524f195f74f680995fd549e, which is the bump to LLVM 21.

In our CI runs, we use to get a symbol called:

{"package":"firmware","tag":"defmt_info","data":"unsafe extern \"C\" fn(i32, i32, i32, i32, i32) -> i32: {}","disambiguator":"16563080428635778541","crate_name":"log"}

we now get a symbol called:

{"package":"firmware","tag":"defmt_info","data":"unsafe extern "C" fn(i32, i32, i32, i32, i32) -> i32: {}","disambiguator":"16563080428635778541","crate_name":"log"}

Note that the backslashes have gone from around the extern \"C\" part. This causes the JSON to be invalid. The line of source code that generated this symbol was:

defmt::info!("unsafe extern \"C\" fn() -> i32: {}", unsafe_c_fn);

On stable, this expands to:

#[link_section = ".defmt,aad749f0cc6920fb"]
#[export_name = "{\"package\":\"firmware\",\"tag\":\"defmt_info\",\"data\":\"extern \\\"C\\\" fn() -> i32: {}\",\"disambiguator\":\"17031413998459764745\",\"crate_name\":\"log\"}"]
static DEFMT_LOG_STATEMENT: u8 = 0;

On nightly this expands to the same code, so it's something inside LLVM that has changed how it handles escapes in symbol names.

Is this an expected side-effect? Is this something we can fix, or were we just holding it wrong?

Not fixing this issue will break anyone using defmt to print strings containing escaped double-quotes, which is going to hurt.

This was originally a Zulip thread at #t-compiler > defmt is broken in nightly - LLVM symbol escaping changed? @ 💬, but we think it is indeed a bug.

[nikic]

Left a comment on the PR. I think the new behavior isn't right, but if the MC maintainer disagrees, we should be able to preserve the previous behavior by escaping symbols on the Rust side.

[VorpalBlade]

It doesn't seem like anything is happening on the LLVM side based on that comment? Would it perhaps be better to open an issue instead?

[nikic]

Can you please provide instructions on how to reproduce the issue so I can confirm a fix? Just running tests on the defmt crate with nightly doesn't seem to result in failures.

[jonathanpallant]

https://github.com/ferrous-systems/rust-training/tree/main/example-code/nrf52/bsp_demo

But change any of the defmt::debug! calls to print a ".