Why does C++ linking use virtually no CPU? (updated)
- by John
On a native C++ project, linking right now can take a minute or two, yet during this time CPU drops from 100% during compilation to virtually zero. Does this mean linking is primarily a disk activity?
If so, is this the main area an SSD would make big changes? But, why aren't all my OBJ files (or as many as possible) kept in RAM after compilation to avoid this? With 4Gb of RAM I should be able to save a lot of disk access and make it CPU-bound again, no?
update: so the obvious follow-up is, can VC++ compiler and linker talk together better to streamline things and keep OBJ files in memory, similar to how Delphi does?