Comment by usrnm

4 hours ago

Wait till you hear how many programming languages there are

Sure, but one might imagine that linkers are generic and reusable, so you can just pick one off the shelf instead of making a new one 1-1 for each language. Empirically this line of reasoning seems to be incorrect.

Different programming languages are very obviously not the same thing - different cp command implementations are similar conceptually to having different linker implementations that all do the same thing. But you knew that so not sure if there was a point you were trying to make there.