Jonathan Blow

But I mean, this is just an insane amount of complexity for something that should be trivial.

It could be trivial, but unfortunately isn't with the current tools we have. If every symbol access went through a PLT or GOT, hot-reloading would be much easier. Or were you thinking about something else? Would love to hear your take on that.

Symbol lookup is just matching a name to a value. This is something we know how to make computers do very fast. Those symbols are a small amount of data, e.g. the symbol for a function is much smaller than the code in almost all cases, and requires no computation whereas the code

took a lot of computation to generate. Yet somehow the linkers are so slow and complicated. It is just a pile of garbage. The solution is not to make the pile of garbage bigger. Someone just has to be the adults in the room and see how absurd this all is.

I am not against making tools to help alleviate the problems of the current regime, *but* I think it is critical that these tools be explicitly aiming to elide all the current garbage complexity as an end-goal. Otherwise we are just making the pile bigger.

So when talking about the problems of the current tools, I think it is important not to give those tools respect they don't deserve. It's not like this problem happened despite everyone's best efforts. It happened because a bunch of people fell asleep and didn't care.

I agree, but didn't quite understand what you're referring to when you say "The solution is not to make the pile of garbage bigger". mold is a completely new linker in 10KLOC that can link Firefox, Chrome, etc. in about ~1.5 seconds, approaching SSD speeds.

The solution he's talking about is getting rid of linkers altogether