Managed equivalent of the unmanaged link editor

Question

What is the managed equivalent of the unmanaged link editor? I just need a relatively simple but accurate answer.

I intend to write an article about unmanaged link editors. I know about that, but I do not know what the managed equivalent is.

A major purpose of the unmanaged link editor is to combine the various output files of the compiler into an executable. This is done by Microsoft C++ and was done in many systems before Windows existed. If you do not understand that then please assume you cannot answer this question.

For Visual C++ the link editor is link.exe. The .Net Framework has the al.exe tool and perhaps it is the closest thing to a link editor for managed code. I do not see the equivalent of object files (the output of an unmanaged compiler) in the files for a .Net project, so I suspect that all the compiler's output from each input file is combined by the compiler. Is that what I should say as being the managed equivalent of the unmanaged link editor?