dyld: lazy symbol binding failed: Symbol not found - nm reports symbol found

Question

Fairly abstract question here, as I don't know quite where to start my own investigations.

I have a C package constructed with CMake that produces librpdb.so; I have a Ruby Gem set up for the same library, which produces rpdb.bundle.

When used in Ruby, I get this:

dyld: lazy symbol binding failed: Symbol not found: _RPDB_RuntimeStorageController_sharedInstance
  Referenced from: /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/rpdb-0.1.0/lib/rpdb/rpdb.bundle
  Expected in: flat namespace

When I look into the library, nm reports:

000000000000ea40 T _RPDB_RuntimeStorageController_sharedInstance

So it appears that the symbol is indeed in the library. Why, then, would binding fail?

Answer 1

Simply put, linking wasn't occurring at the level of the first library, although it wasn't reporting as much because the headers were found appropriately.

More details regarding why this was occurring for my circumstances, here

and also, here