[4ntiq]

This is a fairly high level overview of linkers, most of which you can find for yourself if you look up `ld` documentation [0] (mentioned in the article) and walk through it step by step in a tutorial fashion.

A more comprehensive look would be, at the very least one would hope, to have a reference manual of your favorite MCU and write the corresponding linker script for the memory sections it expects and provide stubs/thunks and other things of that nature. It's the praxis and application that brings the scary things out.

[0] https://sourceware.org/binutils/docs/ld.pdf (nb - after you've gone through the page count of some IC and MCU datasheets, 164 pages of ld will seem like a walk in the park)

[Etheryte]

I don't really find this argument convincing. You don't need to know how to build a car from first principles to drive one. If you're into it, sure, it can be fun and teach you plenty about its failure modes, the scary things as you put it, but most people really don't need nor want to go into that detail.

[4ntiq]

This is nowhere close, nowhere near close, not even within the same 100 mile radius close, of first principles.

This is literally starting from `man ld` and going one step further. The manual literally starts with a `man ld` printout and then goes to describe it from concepts onwards.

If you want first principles we can try to maybe start the discussion at maxwell's equations and take it a handful of hundred steps from there until we arrive at how logic gates, diodes and transistors work.

[bboygravity]

Except in reality 99% of people will just take the example (or auto-generated) linker scripts from the MCU manufacturer without understanding a thing about them and call it a day.

And all will work fine.

[technothrasher]

This worked fine for me for a little while, until I needed to do things that the manufacturer's example script didn't do, such as place certain globals into specific sections of memory. I had to piece the syntax of the linker file together myself, which wasn't too difficult, but a straightforward introduction to the file format would have been appreciated.

[supriyo-biswas]

Implying that you can just read that documentation and "walk through it in a tutorial fashion" is a peak HN comment probably only rivaled by the famous Dropbox comment.

Not everyone is an expert in these things, and I'd appreciate if there were more articles like this.

[4ntiq]

This is what a lot of us have had to do early on because we had no other resources than first-hand manuals (mostly only printed; Hackers scene with books was painfully true), and maybe someone on a BBS or Usenet (later IRC) who could answer a question or two if they felt generous enough with their time to not heckle us for being dumb. If you're looking into `ld`, you've crossed a point of no return.

And the `ld` manual is great and there is nothing wrong with it.

The dropbox comment is people who are completely misguided as to the market value of a product that solves a real pain point for users and the recommended alternatives of using rsync was comically out of touch with the technical acumen of an everyday person. (see also the great "Less space than a nomad. Lame." comment from that other site)

Using `ld` is on the opposite swing of that, and that discussion is very much res de facto technical one with no punches held back. This is what the "Hacker" in "Hacker News" actually stands for.