High Performance Mold Linker Begins Adding macOS, CMake Build Support

[phoronix]

Phoronix: High Performance Mold Linker Begins Adding macOS, CMake Build Support

Last year marked the release of Mold 1.0 as a modern, high-speed linker alternative to the likes of GNU Gold and LLVM LLD. Mold was started by Rui Ueyama who previously worked on the LLVM linker. Mold has continued seeing new features added and out today is version 1.4.1 where "alpha" support for macOS is added and also beginning to work on CMake build system integration...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Mold-1.4.1-Linker

[tachi]

Kinda sad that they chose CMake over Meson in 2022, but it's still better than nothing

[cl333r]

Kinda sad that they chose CMake over Meson in 2022, but it's still better than nothing

Yeah I use CMake but Meson seems to be less verbose and with less heritage burden.

[intelfx]

Kinda sad that they chose CMake over Meson in 2022, but it's still better than nothing

I for one am very glad about it. (Modern) CMake is miles better than Meson. The latter is just a stupid scripting engine, CMake on the other hand contains a lot of actually useful logic wrt. dealing with compilation, flags, dependencies and so on.

[tachi]

I for one am very glad about it. (Modern) CMake is miles better than Meson. The latter is just a stupid scripting engine, CMake on the other hand contains a lot of actually useful logic wrt. dealing with compilation, flags, dependencies and so on.

"complication flags"? Dependencies? Could you please be more specific?

[brad0]

Kinda sad that they chose CMake over Meson in 2022, but it's still better than nothing

Doesn't make sense using Meson when LLVM uses CMake. Meson is bloated too.

[tachi]

Doesn't make sense using Meson when LLVM uses CMake. Meson is bloated too.

I don't see how LLVM is relevant. CMake is as "bloated" as Meson, if not more. Have you ever used them?

[brad0]

I don't see how LLVM is relevant. CMake is as "bloated" as Meson, if not more. Have you ever used them?

Tell me you don't have a clue without telling me you don't have a clue.

[intelfx]

"complication flags"

Could you please be more specific?

Could you please improve your reading comprehension?

[tachi]

Tell me you don't have a clue without telling me you don't have a clue.

I do have a clue. Mold is developed by the same dev who developed LLVM's LLD linker, but is not related to LLVM more than it is related to GCC. But I don't follow Mold development closely, so I may be missing something; please prove me wrong (by providing evidence, not by telling me I'm an idiot).

Could you please improve your reading comprehension?

Ops, sorry, I misspelled "compilation" (thanks, phone keyboard...). What I meant is that I don't really see how CMake helps with logic related to compilation flags. In CMake, to enable a flag only if supported you have to write five lines of fragile code for each flag, in Meson its just two, indipendently of the number of flags you want to check. This may not seem like much, but it is a recurring behaviour, and things like these add up quickly.

And don't get me started with CMake and dependency management... The last update completely revamped how things work, and compared to Meson the situation is still flaky, especially when you're a distribution packager and have to make sure that your packages use system libraries.