Re: Why do we still assemble?

Lars Wirzenius <wirzeniu@cc.helsinki.fi> writes:
- Quong, Russel W., Linton, Mark A.,
+ "Linking Programs Incrementally",
-According to their measurements, their Inclink is up to 70 times faster
+than the standard linker on their system (some version of UNIX). Their
-linker works in time proportional to the the size of the change, while a
+normal linker works in time proportional to the resulting executable.


For most definitions of the phrase 'incremental linking', Multics did it,
and in time proportional to the size of the change. A large fraction of
Unix progress in recent years has been the incorporation of the Multics
features that were originally left out of Unix in order to get it to fit
on a PDP-11. (Unix was Bell Labs' recoil at the horror of the complexity
of Multics, which they had originally helped to support.)
[That last comment is a wee bit oversimplified, but please take arguments
about it to alt.folklore.computers. -John]
--

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