This chapter explores in extreme detail how the linking process works. The linker’s job is to take all the object files that make up a program and put them together. The linker must know exactly what the memory layout of your device is so it can fit the program into memory. It’s also responsible for connecting external symbols in one file with their actual definitions in another. This process is called linking symbols.
It is the linker that knows exactly where things are. On big systems where we have gigabytes of memory, this doesn’t matter that much, but on a microcontroller with 16KB of RAM, knowing what every byte is used ...
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