Mold 1.1.1 Released With Optimized Memory Usage, New Options

[arQon]

(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)

For developers, which is mold's actual audience, there are a LOT more 32-bit systems still in play than most of even the "informed" users (i.e. people who even know what 32-bit means :P) think, especially in embedded systems. While the "real" pipeline is done by cross-compiling, since an x86 workstation is just massively faster than whatever the anemic hardware of the target system is, every once in a while you do need a toolchain that runs on the target system, and when that only has *M*B of RAM to work with and no/slow swap, better tools like this certainly make a difference!

[Sin2x]

It can still make the decisions about what to deploy/upgrade a lot easier. Not that you should ever ignore the changelog.

There is not law requiring developers to use semver and the developer community is anarchic at its heart, so it simply doesn't work despite being out there for a long time.

The name is puzzling, why didn't they go with turbo_LD ?

Pun is fun

[onlyLinuxLuvUBack]

The name is puzzling, why didn't they go with turbo_LD ?

[bug77]

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

It can still make the decisions about what to deploy/upgrade a lot easier. Not that you should ever ignore the 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.

[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.

[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".

[bug77]

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

[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

[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