I think the way I've talked about incremental linking may have given a somewhat misleading impression. I'm not against incremental linking, and I'm not denying its possible usefulness. But especially when I was developing lld, I felt that we should focus first on speeding up full links.

Before I created lld, linking was much slower than it is today, and people somehow seemed to accept that as a given. People would often argue that since linking was slow, we needed to reduce the amount of linking work by implementing incremental linking. I thought that was too pessimistic. Why don't we just make the usual full link much faster, ideally almost as fast as a cp command, so that we don't need incremental linking nearly as much?

In other words, I wanted to solve the slow link problem head-on rather than work around linker slowness. And now we can link multi-gigabyte binaries in a second or two, which makes incremental linking much less urgent than it was ten years ago. That's pretty much what I wanted to achieve.

Am I satisfied with the speed? No. Could incremental linking speed it up even more? Maybe. Would it still be useful? Sure. It may well be worth doing. But people don't need it nearly as badly as they did ten years ago. I wanted to solve the larger problem first.