Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usc!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!olivea!mintaka!spdcc!iecc!compilers-sender From: johnl@iecc.cambridge.ma.us (John R. Levine) Newsgroups: comp.compilers Subject: TOPLAS: Linking Programs Incrementally Keywords: linker, design, experiment Message-ID: <1991Mar21.141616.5721@iecc.cambridge.ma.us> Date: 21 Mar 91 05:06:02 GMT Sender: compilers-sender@iecc.cambridge.ma.us Reply-To: John R. Levine Organization: Compilers Central Lines: 19 Approved: compilers@iecc.cambridge.ma.us The January TOPLAS has an interesting article by Russell Quong and Mark Linton on incremental linking. They noted that in the edit-compile-link-debug cycle, most of the linked modules don't change from one link to another, so they made a modified linker that tries to replace modules in place. It leaves some space (size determined heuristically) after modules that have changed so that moderate growth doesn't require relinking. They found that by allocating 24% slop space, they could relink in place 97% of the time, and that relinking in place was much faster, for some medium sized programs it took under two seconds as opposed to about 30 seconds for a regular ld link. I see that this work mostly took place in 1986-87. Does anyone know of anything more recent along these lines? Regards, John Levine, johnl@iecc.cambridge.ma.us, {spdcc|ima|world}!iecc!johnl -- Send compilers articles to compilers@iecc.cambridge.ma.us or {ima | spdcc | world}!iecc!compilers. Meta-mail to compilers-request.