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.

Anyone nerdy enough writes their own compiler. Lots of people have written their own compressor or archiver; it's still an area of active research.

But linkers? It's kinda a solved problem, and so uninteresting (?). But it's a very large and fiddly problem, and so hard to toy around casually.

Heck, there's way, way more people writing their own *operating system* than their own linker. Or C compiler. Or basically anything you can think of.

@icefox I don't think this is actually true Link time optimization is relatively recent and something the LLVM people have been working on.

And a lot of the limitations of C++ come from it having to be compatible with the C linker. I think things like Rust and Haskell, say, implicitly have their own linker but also use the standard system linker to link with C libraries for foreign calls.

@Azure Rust uses the system linker. Using llvm's code generation to do link-time code optimization (equivalent to what the Java/Clojure people call tree shaking?) is still an unstable feature.

I know this because Windows link.exe does this automatically and someone euphoniously titled WindowsBunny likes to brag about it.