There’s a quote I love from Ian Lance Taylor’s series on linkers about the complexity that creeps into them.
As we’ve seen, what linkers do is basically quite simple, but the details can get complicated. The complexity is because smart programmers can see small optimizations to speed up their programs a little bit, and somtimes the only place those optimizations can be implemented is the linker. Each such optimizations makes the linker a little more complicated. At the same time, of course, the linker has to run as fast as possible, since nobody wants to sit around waiting for it to finish. Today I’ll talk about a classic small optimization implemented by the linker.
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