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Linkers are the lymph nodes of systems. Developers will wax rhapsodic about the virtues of Rust but know nothing about the (necessary) evils of linkers. So the
by CalChris 5y ago
Linkers are the lymph nodes of systems. Developers will wax rhapsodic about the virtues of Rust but know nothing about the (necessary) evils of linkers.
So the OP wrote a linker. But did they write one which understands linker script? Does it understand shared libraries, multiple architectures, multiple object file formats, ...? Is it 'smart'? Can it link itself? Does it support zero pages, ASLR, non-executable stacks+heaps? Is it fast?
Linkers are hard. Relocs and fixups are really hard. The Oracle® Solaris 11.4 Linkers and Libraries Guide is 500+ pages [1]. But if the development environment is done well, you won't have to worry about that, which is pretty cool.
[1] I always wanted a Linker Alien t-shirt.
http://www.linker-aliens.org/ http://www.linker-aliens.org/