Link time

Link time refers to the linking phase of the program life cycle. Link-time actions are performed by the OS linker and/or loader. The main objective of linking is mapping the higher-level language semantics onto the lower-level environment (OS and the hardware). Traditionally this includes address translation, binding the external objects (modules), code optimization, machine code translation (like for example in OpenVMS).

The linker's input is the object code generated by the compiler. The output is either an executable code or a partially linked code in the form of an object library or a dynamically linked library.