Linkers are such weird pieces of software.
So intricate that they're a huge endeavor, so fundamental every developer needs one, but so obscure there's very few of them. There's more production-quality assemblers and web servers than linkers, but neither will ever work without a linker.
Such a strange corner of computer technology.
@icefox at least there's more than one FOSS one now!
@kellerfuchs @impiaaa @er1n yeah, but do modern BSDs use it? Idk. I should use bsd more.
@kellerfuchs @er1n @impiaaa they're intimately but arcanely related!
@kellerfuchs @er1n @impiaaa ELF is pretty okay, I guess.
@impiaaa @er1n @kellerfuchs eventually we'll invent something Better Enough that people start using it
But having written an ELF loader, apparently not yet.
@kellerfuchs @er1n @impiaaa I assume PE is is about as good, give or take a little.
Though I still love that a.out's Magic Number is the PDP-8 instructon for "jump forward the length of the header". Beautiful and terrible at the same time, sorta like Galadriel.
@icefox @er1n @impiaaa Eeeeh, yes?
Solaris has it's own linker, FreeBSD has rtld(1), which itself seems to have diverged significantly from OpenBSD's ld.so(1)