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Checkpoint: Translation Units & Linkage

intermediate20 min readLesson 88 of 148

Prove you can model the build pipeline and its failure modes before moving to pointers.

What you just proved

  • You can distinguish the three build stages and their error signatures.
  • You can predict internal vs external linkage consequences (independent accumulators, shared objects).
  • You understand why returning locals dangles and literals survive.
  • You can model symbol resolution — the linker's actual job — in miniature.

Next module stops treating pointers as syntax and starts treating them as addresses you can reason about precisely.