There's not much difference between a linker and a loader; they do almost the same thing, one persisting the result to disk and the other to memory. I do notice

There's not much difference between a linker and a loader; they do almost the same thing, one persisting the result to disk and the other to memory. I do notice that your definition of a loader does not support shared libraries, which is most of what a loader does outside of a toy OS. Linkers are also similar to garbage collectors; smart linkers effectively eliminate bloat by garbage collecting the code.