That requirement vhas been gone for decades if it ever existed, though static library semantics look a bit like that if you don't pass extra flags around them.

That requirement vhas been gone for decades if it ever existed, though static library semantics look a bit like that if you don't pass extra flags around them. Linkers are multiple pass if doing compiler optimisation things. Otherwise they're pretty close to cat + patch some pieces, single pass seems fair. It's not immediately obvious to me why linkers don't say which functions were making the undefined symbol call. A suspicion is that the linker may not know what the function name is for the corresponding instruction without digging it out of the debug info and the linker probably doesn't have the corresponding parser ready to hand. It probably could narrow it down to a source object file, though libraries make that difficult.