Comment by wizzwizz4
9 hours ago
> There was a time when you had to know ‘as’, ‘ld’ and maybe even ‘ar’ to get an executable.
No, there wasn't: you could just run the shell script, or (a bit later) the makefile. But there were benefits to knowing as, ld and ar, and there still are today.
> But there were benefits to knowing as, ld and ar, and there still are today.
This is trivially true. The constraint for anything you do in your life is time it takes to know something.
So the far more interesting question is: At what level do you want to solve problems – and is it likely that you need knowledge of as, ld and ar over anything else, that you could learn instead?
Knowledge of as, ld, ar, cc, etc is only needed when setting up (or modifying) your build toolchain, and in practice you can just copy-paste the build script from some other, similar project. Knowledge of these tools has never been needed.
Knowledge of cc has never been needed? What an optimist! You must never have had headers installed in a place where the compiler (or Makefile author) didn’t expect them. Same problems with the libraries. Worse when the routine you needed to link was in a different library (maybe an arch-specific optimized lib).
That post is only true in the most vacuous sense.
“A similar project” discovered where, on BITNET?
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