Linker? What's a linker?

For better or worse (mainly worse), I had to dip back into some "retro" development recently.

I'm talkin' 1998...

I'm talkin'...

• Cher - Believe - yikes!
• Aerosmith - I Don't Want to Miss a Thing - ewwwwww!
• Celine Dion - My Heart Will Go On - my ears! they burn! they burn!
• Run DMC vs Jason Nevins - It's Like That - actually, that one's not bad I suppose...

I'm talkin'.... Visual Basic 6...

So wallowing in the fun that ensues from supporting 12 year old technology, a colleague asked about a particular build error spat out of the command line:

LINK : fatal error LNK1104: cannot open file xxxx.lib

and then, shortly after...

Linker? What's a linker?

Oh dear. I have been using the .Net CLR for way too long. It's been around for over 10 years now, and the idea of having to manually resolve external symbols, reallocate addresses and "bake" libraries into a single executable is now totally foreign.

Oh well, at least I can enjoy some sweet '98 tunes while I lament the loss of static linking...

FYI: a linker is like that and that's the way it is...