"John P. Linderman" <jpl.jpl(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I guess it [ar] lives on in the creation of
"libraries" that could be
loaded by compilers, although I think shared objects have largely replaced
archive files, and I'm not sure if archive files are even accepted any more.
Archive files (static libraries) are alive and well and work just fine,
on Linux and every other *nix that I know about. The format is even
used on Windows for static libraries and for whatever you call them when
linking dynamic libraries (they provide the symbols, but not the dll).
(Do a file xxx.lib on a Linux system with a .lib file from Windows
and you'll see. Boy was I surprised the first time I did that!)
Arnold