Re: Linker ... still useful ?

guerin@IRO.UMontreal.CA:
> I don't want to question the usefulness of linkers as tools, since of
> course they are quite used, and then probably useful.
>
> No, what I want to question in fact is linking as a process different from
> compilation, as a real step in the process of building executables.


As I pointed out in


    Assembly Language as Object Code,
    Software - Practice and Experience, 13, 8 (1983) 715-725.


Assemblers and linkers can do exactly the same thing. I did this by
taking a fairly ordinary assembler with conditional and text inclusion
facilities and showing how it could be used as a linker. Fraser and
Hanson showed much the same thing when they developed a linker that
used a textual object language and then showed how it could be used
as an assembler, in:


    A Machine Independant Linker,
    Software - Practice and Experience, 13, 4, (1982) 351-366.


In both of these papers, the linkers being addressed support the normal
FORTRAN/C linkage conventions.


I recommend both papers to anyone interested in how to write such linkers,
and I give away the SMAL assembler and manual, on which I based my paper
cited above, to anyone who wants it. Here's the URL (in this case, an FTP
address):


        ftp://ftp.cs.uiowa.edu/public/jones/smal/


The software should be quite useful for instructional purposes, and if you
happen to be developing a new computer architecture, it's a good starting
point for hacking up an assembler and linker for the new machine.


Doug Jones
jones@cs.uiowa.edu
--

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