Embedded Compiler Version

By default, every artifact RuSTy compiles carries a small piece of metadata that records which version of plc produced it. The metadata follows the same convention clang, rustc, and gcc use for their own producer identification — it lives in the module’s !llvm.ident named metadata, which the linker preserves into the ELF .comment section of the final binary.

What gets embedded

A single line of the form:

plc version <version> (<commit date>, <short hash>)

For example:

plc version 0.5.0 (Mon May 11 10:32:29 2026 +0000, be1de6f175)

The same string is also reported by plc --version, so a deployed .o, .so, or executable can be matched back to the exact plc build that produced it without access to the source tree or build logs.

Inspecting a binary

Any of these work on Linux:

readelf -p .comment my_program
llvm-objdump --section=.comment my_program
strings my_program | grep '^plc version'

A real link typically shows several producers stacked in .comment — one per toolchain involved in the build. For example:

plc version 0.5.0 (Mon May 11 10:32:29 2026 +0000, be1de6f175)
Linker: Ubuntu LLD 18.1.3
GCC: (Ubuntu 13.3.0-6ubuntu2~24.04.1) 13.3.0

The plc version … line is the one this feature controls. The others come from the linker driver and any C runtime objects that got pulled in at link time.

Strippability

The .comment section survives strip --strip-debug and strip --strip-all by default — it is PROGBITS non-ALLOC data that GNU strip preserves. Removing it explicitly takes:

objcopy --remove-section=.comment my_program
# or
strip --remove-section=.comment my_program

If your deployment pipeline strips the comment section as a deliberate policy, the producer information is removed; without that explicit step it persists.

Disabling for reproducible builds

The embedded date and hash refer to the plc binary itself, so the string changes whenever plc is upgraded. Pipelines that need byte-identical artifacts across plc upgrades can suppress the emission with:

plc --fno-ident src/main.st

With --fno-ident:

• No plc version … line appears in .comment of the compiled artifact.
• All other producer information (linker, C runtime) is unaffected — those come from tools outside plc.