Arguably when compiling/assembling is "free", outside of using precompiled code without source code, there's little reason for the linking phase. Ostensibly it

Arguably when compiling/assembling is "free", outside of using precompiled code without source code, there's little reason for the linking phase. Ostensibly it was faster to link precompiled code than to constantly recompile it. But even back with Turbo Pascal, I think that was called into question. Especially as the CPUs went faster and faster, and memory expanded, but I/O dragged behind. Now, I don't think anyone would blink at constantly rebuilding 100K lines of assembly. It takes seconds on modern hardware. We even see that in the C world with large utilities shipped as a ".h" file.