[TUHS] What does `ld` stand for?

[christopher fujino via TUHS]

Ahh, thank you Bakul for that reference. With the Levine context and the
source from v2, it seems to me like it means Link eDitor. Coincidentally, a
friend had recommended that book for me to read, and I haven't gotten
around to it yet. I really should!

Chris

On Sun, Oct 25, 2026 at 11:08 AM Bakul Shah <bakul at iitbombay.org> wrote:

> On Oct 25, 2026, at 10:42 AM, christopher fujino via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org>
> wrote:
> >
> > My friend, taking an OS course was wondering what `ld` stood for. After
> > doing an online search, concluded "no one knows." Surely someone around
> > here must remember why the linker is called `ld`? Thanks!
>
> From John R. Levine's "Linkers & Loaders" book:
>
> As early as 1947, programmers started to use primitive
> loaders that could take program routines stored on separate
> tapes and combine and relocate them into one program. By the
> early 1960s, these loaders had evolved into full-fledged
> linkage editors.
> ...
> Programmers were using libraries of subprograms even before
> they used assemblers. By 1947, John Mauchly,who led the
> ENIAC project, wrote about loading programs along with
> subprograms selected from a catalog of programs stored on
> tapes, and of the need to relocate the subprograms’ code to
> reflect the addresses at which they were loaded. Perhaps
> surprisingly, these two basic linker functions, relocation and
> library search, appear to predate even assemblers, as Mauchly
> expected both the program and subprograms to be written in
> machine language. The relocating loader allowed the authors
> and users of the subprograms to write each subprogram as
> though it would start at location zero, and to defer the
> actual address binding until the subprograms were linked with
> a particular main program.