The link stage is pretty huge. It currently won't compile with emscripten with debug symbols, in-fact the entire obj-pre-link stage is 8.9GB of "bytecode". Th

The link stage is pretty huge. It currently won't compile with emscripten with debug symbols, in-fact the entire obj-pre-link stage is 8.9GB of "bytecode". There really isn't a layout algorithm but it does seem like overtime they began to contain it as to make it not platform dependent (thank god). I think that the major achievement of webkit wasn't in the code they took from KHTML ;) but in the unit tests that were created and the robust amounts of work that went in to focus on making things pixel perfect. Prior to webkit a margin meant whatever the hell the damn implementers felt like. If it worked at all. I should say much of the code in WebKit is no-mans-land, or essentially greatest common denominator work to make webkit portable to multiple architectures. That's why the linking takes so long and you can go from >1/2 GB of source code, 4GB of linker memory down to a 20MB object file.