linkers are a hot spot for innovation in infrastructure now. LTO (link time optimisation) is the hot topic for Apple’s new generation of linkers, enabling them

linkers are a hot spot for innovation in infrastructure now. LTO (link time optimisation) is the hot topic for Apple’s new generation of linkers, enabling them to optimise across functions, etc. All languages are trying FFI (foreign function interfaces) and need to bridge different calling conventions (mostly collapsing to the arch-dependent c convention). Some AI Companies like Modular are combining pipeline services with optimisations at low levels. Python has legs because it can achieve targeted performance by lowering to c or GPU/TPU/NPU but it can hard to combine them. But these are hard and mostly hidden challenges. Most developers and leads will top out at understanding how to recognise and manage link time errors and bugs. (My hope is that inter-op being mostly intractable could drive languages to agree on something more principled than legacy c conventions, but it would take a large player to shepherd agreement, and they have little interest in inter-op)