Mold 2.2 Linker Released With More Optimizations, BLAKE3 Crypto Hashing

Rui Ueyama published today a new version of Mold, the open-source high speed linker that has easily outpaced the common linkers from the GNU and LLVM projects. Mold 2.2 continues work on its performance quest, expanding its multiple CPU architectures supported, and other new work.

First of all with the new Mold 2.2, BLAKE3 has replaced SHA256 as its preferred cryptographic hash function. BLAKE3 is now used over SHA256 to speed-up the --build-id argument that it's now "a few percent faster" and also drops libssl as a build dependency for Mold.

Mold 2.2 performance work also includes an optimization for its string merging code path and now emitting slightly more optimized code for thread-local variable accesses. Mold 2.2 on RISC-V also adds support for TLSDESC re-locations on RISC-V for faster thread-local variable access.

Downloads and more details on the Mold 2.2 changes via the release announcement.