Comment by kibwen
1 year ago
Presumably they're talking about linker scripts, and IMO if you're one of the vanishingly rare people who absolutely needs a linker script for some reason, then, firstly, my condolences, and secondly, given that 99.999% percent of users never need linker scripts, and given how much complexity and fragility their support adds to linker codebases, I'm perfectly happy to say that the rest of us can happily use fast and simple linkers that don't support linker scripts, and the other poor souls can keep using ld.
Anyone wondering why you'd need a linker script: They are essential on bare metal, as you have to tell the linker where the hardware requires you to put stuff. There are lots in the linux kernel repo, u-boot, probably Arduino, etc.
They are also very useful if you care a lot about the size of the resulting binary.
It’s pretty common to roll your own linker script in embedded software development