Linkers and Loaders (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Software Engineering and Programming)

Category: Programming
Author: John R. Levine
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by pbiggar   2022-06-22
FYI: https://www.amazon.com/Linkers-Loaders-John-R-Levine/dp/1558...
by zabzonk   2021-06-12
Good book on linkers (though a bit dated, and definitely over-priced - worth buying S/H): https://www.amazon.co.uk/Linkers-Kaufmann-Software-Engineeri...
by ori_b   2019-09-16
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1558604960
by anonymous   2017-08-20

I believe that's related to optimizer. But, for linker I suggest reading the points below since you showed curiosity about linkers. Reading these would help any C & C++ programmer. Knowing what linking actually means is an important knowledge.

  • Linkers

For more info:

  • Linkers and Loaders
  • How OSX executes applications (OSX specific but, still informative about the general process)

Note: This may not be what you were looking for but researching and learning what you're looking for by yourself will make what you learned last longer.

by dirkgently   2017-08-20

Take a look at link-time optimization. This is necessarily vendor dependent. It will also depend how you build your binaries. MS compilers (2005 onwards at least) provide something called Function Level Linking -- which is another way of stripping symbols you don't need. This post explains how the same can be achieved with GCC (this is old, GCC must've moved on but the content is relevant to your question).

Also take a look at the LLVM implementation (and the examples section).

I suggest you also take a look at Linkers and Loaders by John Levine -- an excellent read.