The formal documentation of the binder refers to the ability of the binder to take an executable program (a load module) as input. Exploitation of this function can significantly improve the overall performance of the system with software-development workloads, as well as the response time of individual ld commands.
In most typical UNIX systems, the ld command always takes as input a set of files containing object code, either from individual .o files or from archived libraries of .o files. The ld command then resolves the external references among these files and writes an executable program with the default name of a.out. The a.out file can only be executed. If a bug is found in one of the modules that was included in the a.out file, the defective source code is changed and recompiled, and then the entire ld process must be repeated, starting from the full set of .o files.
In this operating system, however, the binder can accept both .o and a.out files as input, because the binder includes resolved External Symbol Dictionary (ESD) and Relocation Dictionary (RLD) information in the executable file. This means that the user has the ability to rebind an existing executable program to replace a single modified .o file, rather than build a new executable program from the beginning. Because the binding process consumes storage and processor cycles partly in proportion to the number of different files being accessed and the number of different references to symbols that have to be resolved, rebinding an executable program with a new version of one module is much quicker than binding it from scratch.