Separate compilation. Of course, if your compiler is fast enough to rebuild the whole universe in 6 seconds and then rest on the seventh — an approach Wirth adv

Separate compilation. Of course, if your compiler is fast enough to rebuild the whole universe in 6 seconds and then rest on the seventh — an approach Wirth advocated in one of his papers about an implementation of Pascal system — you won't need a linker. But most compilers are not that fast. Besides, there is more than one programming language, so that's something we have to deal with somehow. And to be fair, merging modules in the compiler, as you go by, while not that difficult, is just annoying. If you link them properly together, into big amalgamated text/rodata/data sections, then you need to apply relocations (and have them in the first place). If you just place them next to each other, then you have to organize the inter-module calls via some moral equivalent of GOT/PLT. In any case, all this logic really doesn't have much to do with code generation proper, it's administrativia — and logic for dealing with has already been written for you and packed in the so called "link editor".