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!

@impiaaa @icefox what, gnu ld, gnu gold, and LLD?

@er1n @impiaaa yeah basically.

Microsoft link.exe deserves mention because it's apparently actually pretty good.

But even then... Intel has icc, but is there an Intel linker? Not that I'm aware.

Does Solaris have it's own linker? BSDs? Not afaik.

@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)

@impiaaa @er1n @icefox I mean, 4.2BSD was a thing before the GNU project released its toolchain, so of course it had to have its own runtime linker.

@icefox @er1n @impiaaa Nevermind, I'm too tired to speak about tech tonight: you are talking about the toolchain's linker, not the dynamic (“run-time”) linker.

@kellerfuchs @er1n @impiaaa they're intimately but arcanely related!