Mold 1.1.1 Released With Optimized Memory Usage, New Options

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Mold 1.1.1 Released With Optimized Memory Usage, New Options

A new version of the high performance, open-source Mold linker is now available with more feature additions and performance optimizations...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Mold-1.1.1-Released

[scottishduck]

The ebuild on gentoo seems to be actively maintained so I may need to give this a try

[david-nk]

mold is 25 times faster than gold and to think that gold is already several times faster than the default linker that is still shipped with distros... the defaults should really be reconsidered. Linking a small to medium sized project with debug symbols and -fsanitize options already takes a full minute on my system, imagine a large project.

[Gusar]

Optimizing for memory usage is good. The only thing that can link Chromium on 32bit is bfd, gold and lld need more than 4GB.

(in case anyone asks why one would run a 32bit system nowadays, I did until recently and the reason is inertia - the system was working, so why mess with it)

[Azpegath]

The ebuild on gentoo seems to be actively maintained so I may need to give this a try

I tried it and I thought it was fine, until I hit some issues when linking Firefox (I think). I disabled it for the time being, but perhaps it's worth trying again.
I hadn't patched GCC, like the wiki says to do, perhaps that is the reason for it not working.

https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Mold

There is a problem with latest GCC though: https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-1147219-highlight-mold.html?sid=d2347e8c3b64bdd878d69912820b85a8

[scottishduck]

I tried it and I thought it was fine, until I hit some issues when linking Firefox (I think). I disabled it for the time being, but perhaps it's worth trying again.
I hadn't patched GCC, like the wiki says to do, perhaps that is the reason for it not working.

https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Mold

There is a problem with latest GCC though: https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-1147219-highlight-mold.html?sid=d2347e8c3b64bdd878d69912820b85a8

I’m running a GCC-free system so I may have more luck with clang. I’ll give it a try in the near future for an emerge world and submit some tickets should anything fail

[bug77]

And there I was thinking Mold was using semver and 1.1.1 was a bugfix release...

[Almindor]

mold is 25 times faster than gold and to think that gold is already several times faster than the default linker that is still shipped with distros... the defaults should really be reconsidered. Linking a small to medium sized project with debug symbols and -fsanitize options already takes a full minute on my system, imagine a large project.

Linkers are a bit of an arcane piece of technology. I tried to learn more about them and build a toy linker when Mold was still < v1.0 and I didn't know about it yet. it was HARD finding modern linker articles or other sources. My first material was a book from the 80s.

It's fairly straightforward to just do linking tasks in series, but once you start to parallelize it's a different beast. And then of course there are more modern things like memory mapped files etc. that might not have been used by the old linkers causing them to be a "load all in memory, do things one by one, finalize" kind of approach.

Mold has shown the world how much of modern programming wasn't utilized in linkers. I think mostly just because "it works so why bother".

[Sin2x]

And there I was thinking Mold was using semver and 1.1.1 was a bugfix release...

Semver is a gimmick for codemonkeys, forget about it in the real world, where you actually need to read the goddamn changelog.

[brad0]

mold is 25 times faster than gold and to think that gold is already several times faster than the default linker that is still shipped with distros... the defaults should really be reconsidered. Linking a small to medium sized project with debug symbols and -fsanitize options already takes a full minute on my system, imagine a large project.

Some operating systems like FreeBSD / OpenBSD and OnenMandriva have already moved away from the bfd linker to lld.