Mold 1.0 Released As A Modern High-Speed Linker Alternative To GNU Gold, LLVM LLD

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Mold 1.0 Released As A Modern High-Speed Linker Alternative To GNU Gold, LLVM LLD

Mold 1.0 is a production-ready, high-speed linker alternative to GNU's Gold or LLVM's LLD that currently is supported on Linux systems and written by the original LLD author...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Mold-1.0-Released

[babali]

It does not support LTO it seems.

[mlau]

It does not support LTO it seems.

You can't build anything with fancy linker scripts either, from the issue tracker:

mold cannot be used to build OS kernels because it doesn't support linker scripts. It's intended to speed up user-land program compilation.

[babali]

Anyway I welcome the initiative and I hope that its technology will act as a proof of concept and lead to lld improvements.

[direc85]

I didn't check of there's a story behind the name "mold" but come on... I know the Linux community loves bad puns, but wasn't "weld" available? It's one way to make links, after all

[sdack]

Why call it mold when it is new? *lol*

[linuxgeex]

This is great news. I hate waiting. < 3s to link chromium... awesome. Adds new meaning to <3 !

[carewolf]

It does not support LTO it seems.

LTO "linking" isn't really linking. It is compilation. So a different task and done by the compiler.

[brent]

I wonder if some of the techniques can be adapted in lld? mold seems nice, but it's not very feature complete and unlikely to ever become full-featured.

[coder]

I wish they'd make a graph, like the one shown in the article, except with (user + sys) as the time scale, instead of real time. The reason being that if you have a parallel build with lots of other jobs running, maybe you don't want a few instances of the linker to completely swamp the CPU.