In an attempt to close #4210 (closed) the LLVM code generator's mangler was modified in ed67d290 to rewrite symbol types from @function to @object. This was done in order to prevent the linker from sending reference through the PLT which breaks info tables.

Unfortunately, this mangling was a simple text replacement of @function to @object in the assembler produced by LLVM and made no attempt to distinguish .type directives (which the mangling targets) from other occurrences of the token. As rwbarton unfortunately found out, this means that any occurrences of "@function" in user code (e.g. the LLVM backend itself while compiling GHC) will be rewritten to "@object" in the produced object. Hilarity ensues.

This can be demonstrated by the simple test main = putStrLn "@function", which prints @object in the affected releases (7.8.1 through 7.8.3 thusfar).