On 2012-05-04 01:57, H. S. Teoh wrote:
To be frank, I question the wisdom of not just using ld on Posix systems... but OTOH, the world *needs* better linker technology than we currently have, so this projects like this one is a good thing.
He can start with a version for Windows. If as much as possible of the code is generic and modular designed it should be easy to add support for new formats and platforms.
Linkers date from several decades ago, where programs can be broken up into separate, self-contained source files in a simple way. Things have changed a lot since then. Nowadays, we have template functions, virtual functions, dynamic libraries, etc., which require hacks like weak symbols to work properly. And we're *still* missing a sound conceptual framework for things like cross-module dead code elimination, cross-module template instantiation, duplicate code merging (like overlapping immutable arrays), etc.. These things _sorta_ work right now, but they're sorta hacked on top of basic 30-year-old linker technology, rather than being part of a sound, conceptual linker paradigm.
That would be really nice. -- /Jacob Carlborg
