Linkers are such weird pieces of software.
So intricate that they're a huge endeavor, so fundamental every developer needs one, but so obscure there's very few of them. There's more production-quality assemblers and web servers than linkers, but neither will ever work without a linker.
Such a strange corner of computer technology.
@icefox FWIW (yes research done in the group I'm in) http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~pes20/rems/papers/oopsla-elf-linking-2016.pdf
@icefox a pleasure... and it doesn't even handle the dynamic linker iirc