[asveikau]

Aside from this kind of trick, I have not worked with a ton of ARM assembly but what I find is very frequently compilers will just put values in the text section close to where they are used and refer to them with some PC-relative thing, rather than using immediate values as often as they might on x86. I have seen this on other RISC platforms as well.

[thrownaway2424]

Wouldn't that require the pc-relative address to fit into this immediate scheme?

[stephencanon]

In order to have a single-instruction PR-relative load the offset needs to be small (though it uses a different immediate scheme for the offset). So in practice you usually tuck small constant islands between blocks of executable code when you adopt this approach.

[thrownaway2424]

That's what I was thinking. I also started wondering how a large structure might be packed, when you can relatively address every byte in the nearest 256 bytes but only every 4 bytes in the next KB and so on. It could sort of upend the way you might normally think about packing a struct.