Re: question about linker

On 13/12/2024 18:26, Janis Papanagnou wrote:

On 13.12.2024 17:29, David Brown wrote:

On 13/12/2024 15:20, Waldek Hebisch wrote:

[...]

 Since all I wanted is to know where you got your impression from,
Waldek, my question is (yet) fully answered. - Thanks.
 I'm also glad that David had already thoroughly replied to your
post and I'm alleviated from that burden. As got obvious he read
(and interpreted) the quoted statement in exactly the same way as
I did. - Thanks as well.
 

[...]
>
(As an aside, who would ever compile gawk, other than the developers and
people building *nix distributions - who would all be using gcc or clang
for the job?  [...]

 I'm a bit puzzled about that statement. - I certainly compile the
GNU Awk source from the tar-file whenever I get my hands on a new
version (including beta-test versions).
 

Okay, I guess that answers my question - there /are/ some people who compile it from source on a regular basis.
But I suspect that for a tool like gawk, that would be rare - for most people who use gawk, it usually makes little difference if they use a version from last month or last century, so they will use whatever their distribution provides.  (I guess people who use source-based Linux distros will compile it on their own machine, but they too will generally use gcc or clang for that.)
You are clearly far more of a gawk user than I am - do you think many people actively (as distinct from, say, a general update on a source-based Linux distro) download the source and compile it themselves?

I haven't looked into the package makefile but I suppose it will
use the "cc" that is standard on my system (which is a 'gcc').
 (It requires literally not more than a nett minute (to download &
unpack & configure & make & install) on my old and rusty Linux box.)
 Janis