Linking

The saker.msvc.clink() task allows linking compiled object files and other supported inputs. The task can be used to link for the local machine, or for any other supported architectures.

The task serves as a frontend for the link.exe present in the MSVC toolchain.

The simplest example for linking is the following:

$ccompile = saker.msvc.ccompile(### ... ###)
saker.msvc.clink($ccompile)

The above takes the result of a compilation and performs the linking for the output object files. The target architecture, and identifier will be inferred from the compilation task output.

The task allows specifying various options on how the linking should be done:

saker.msvc.clink(
	Input: ### ... ###,
	SimpleParameters: [ /DLL, /LTCG ]
)

The above will cause the task to pass the /DLL and /LTCG parameters directly to the backend link.exe.

Output

The output of the linking is placed in the build directory. It will be under the {build-dir}/saker.msvc.clink/{compilation-id}/{architecture} directory where {compilation-id} is the compilation identifier of the linker pass and {architecture} is the target architecture of the compilation.

Compilation identifier

The compilation identifier (and the target architecture) uniquely identifies a given linker pass during the build system execution. It is used to distinguish the different linking operations, their outputs, and to prevent accidental overwriting of each others outputs. The Identifier parameter can be used to set a custom one:

saker.msvc.clink(
	Input: #### ... ###,
	Identifier: main
)

The compilation identifier is also used to determine if any linker options need to be merged for the linker pass.

Architecture

The linking of the inputs can be done for a given target architecture. The saker.msvc.clink() task can be instructed to link for a given architecture by specifying the Architecture parameter:

saker.msvc.clink(
	Input: #### ... ###,
	Architecture: x64
)

If no architecture is specified, the linker task will attempt to infer the target architecture based on the inputs. If that cannot be done, the architecture of the local machine is used.