A problem I experienced when pursuing my PhD and submitting academic articles was that I had built solutions to problems that required dramatic scale to be effective and worthwhile. Responses to my publication submissions often claimed such problems did not exist; however, I had observed them during my time within industry, such as at Google, but I couldn’t cite it!

Farid Zakaria’s Blog

Large statically-linked binaries at companies like Google can exceed 25GiB and hit the "2GiB Relocation Barrier" on x86_64. This occurs because the CALL instruction uses a 32-bit signed relative offset, limiting jumps to ±2GiB. When functions are farther apart, the linker fails with relocation overflow errors. The solution is using -mcmodel=large, which replaces 5-byte relative CALLs with 12-byte absolute jumps, causing instruction bloat and increased register pressure. The article demonstrates this problem through practical examples with objdump, readelf, and linker scripts.

Huge binaries