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Prebinding

Prebinding is the process of computing at build time the addresses for the symbols imported by libraries and applications, so that less work needs to be performed by the dynamic linker at runtime.

If a user installs your software on a system with a set of libraries that is different than those present when the application was built, the prebinding information cannot be used and application launch is slower. If you use the PackageMaker application to package your software and let users install it with the Installer application, Installer automatically attempts to update prebinding information for the software it installs by running the update_prebinding tool. If your software uses drag-and-drop installation, you can provide instructions for how to run this tool through a Read Me file, printed documentation, or other mechanism.

Prebinding is only applicable for Mach-O executables. (Mach-O is the native executable format in Mac OS X and is the only format supported by Xcode.) In addition, there are some circumstances where prebinding information cannot be updated or used. For details, see the following:

• “Prebinding Your Application” in Launch Time Performance Guidelines.

• The man pages for update_prebinding and redo_prebinding. (You can search for and view man pages in Xcode with Help > Open man page.)

For more information on distributing your software, see Software Delivery Guide.

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