Incremental linking on HP-UX

Abstract

The linker is often a time bottleneck in the development of large applications. Traditional linkers process all input files, even if only one or two objects have changed since the previous link. To shorten link time, we have developed an incremental linker for HP-UX which only processes modified files. Users can take advantage of the performance gains without modifying their usage patterns of the existing HP-UX linker since the incremental linker is implemented on top of the regular 64-bit linker. In addition to the tasks of the normal linker, the incremental linker must save extra information about input files, symbols and relocations, allow for the expansion of existing files and addition of new ones by allocating padding spaces in the output file and use this information to perform in-place updates. The results of several different design considerations and tradeoffs are materialized in link-time performance gains of up to thirteen times that of a normal link for large applications.