Potential of a compiler that creates the executable at once

[Patrick Schluter]

On Friday, 11 February 2022 at 04:18:42 UTC, Era Scarecrow wrote:
> On Thursday, 10 February 2022 at 09:41:12 UTC, rempas wrote:
>> A couple of months ago, I found out about a language called 
>> [Vox](https://github.com/MrSmith33/vox) which uses a design 
>> that I haven't seen before by any other compiler which is to 
>> not create object files and then link them together but 
>> instead, always create an executable at once.
>
>  TCC (*Tiny C Compiler*) does this like 10 years ago. TCC was 
> originally made as part of the obfuscation programming 
> challenge, and then got updated to be more complete.
>
>  https://www.bellard.org/tcc/

If one wants to get really historic it is also what made Turbo 
Pascal did up to version 3.0. With Turbo Pascal 4.0 they went 
back to more classic object file/linker and there is a good 
reason for that. Separate compilation and linking modules and 
libraries are a thing. If you build the compiler for direct 
executable production you have to still support normal object 
file/library handling i.e. you put the functionality of the 
linker into your compiler.