Abstract: An incremental linker provides for faster linking and portability to a variety of systems and environmnets. The incremental linker uses dynamic linking and loading wherein the originally written routines are linked as a dynamically loadable library. Routines that are subsequently modified are linked as a separately loaded program that calls the dynamically loadable library. The separately loaded program is loaded first, so any modified routine already present in the separately loaded program will be used in place of an equivalent unmodified routine that is present in the dynamic link library. In this manner, the modified routine is used in place of the unmodified routine, thus the modified routine is incrementally linked into the program.