malformed mach-o image: symbol table underruns __LINKEDIT - xcode

Question

Using the new Xcode 8 GM build on the GM of macOS Sierra, I've recompiled a Qt 5.7 C++ project and I'm getting the following error message when trying to launch the app:
Reason: no suitable image found. Did find:
/path/to/my/lib/libio_core.dylib:
malformed mach-o image: symbol table underruns __LINKEDIT
This doesn't occur on debug builds, only release. Does anyone have an idea as to what this means and how to go about fixing it?
Update:
This actually has nothing to do with Xcode 8. Building the same code with Xcode 7.3.1 results in the same outcome. It seems some apps that ran just fine on El Capitan won't run on Sierra and fail with the above error.
Update 2: Details about the symbol table in my binary:
Load command 5
cmd LC_SYMTAB
cmdsize 24
symoff 0
nsyms 0
stroff 12760
strsize 8

Answer 1

Turns out this was caused by Qt. Qt 5.7.0 calls strip with no arguments when performing the install task on libs. With macOS Sierra this results in a dylib with an empty symtab.
This bug will be fixed in Qt 5.7.1. In the meantime, just make sure you call strip with -S -x for dynamic libraries.

Answer 2

I am seeing a similar error and I have just figured it out in my case. I hope what I found will help you too.
So, basically, as far as I can tell, this happens when your binary has an empty symbol table (there might be other cases, though). You can check this by running objdump -private-headers <library>:
<...>
Load command 4
cmd LC_SYMTAB
cmdsize 24
symoff 0
nsyms 0 <-- no symbols, oops
stroff 4104
strsize 8
<...>
Linker believes that if the symbol table is empty (nsyms 0) it is ok to say that the offset of the table into the file is zero (symoff 0). So, strictly speaking, it claims that the table starts right at the beginning of the binary.
Apparently, the new version of dyld from 10.12 Sierra performs a check that previous versions did not perform: it makes sure that the symbols table is entirely within the __LINKEDIT segment. Well, in our case the symbol table clearly violates this constraint and dyld does not care that it is empty.
I would call this an Apple’s bug: their linker creates malformed binaries and doesn’t bother to even issue a warning. If I were Apple, I would modify the condition in dyld to ignore the symbol table constraint if the symbol table is empty.
There is only one workaround I can see: add a dummy symbol to your reexport library.