Mold 2.33 Adds New Flag To Further Speed Up The Linker

Mold 2.33 is out as the newest version of this high speed linker as an alternative to the likes of GNU Gold and LLVM LLD. With Mold 2.33 there are still new performance optimizations being worked out by lead developer Rui Ueyama.

With Mold 2.33 a new "--separate-debug-info" flag is introduced to bundle debug info sections into a separate file rather than the main output file. The focus with this option is on speeding up the linker even more. Rui explains of the benefits of this option:

"By default, mold creates a separate debug file in the background after creating a main output file, so that you can start running the executable as soon as possible while mold is still working on linking its debug info sections. For example, linking clang with debug info normally takes ~1.70s on a Threadripper 7980X machine, while it takes only ~0.52s with --separate-debug-info. Shaving off a full second in quick edit-rebuild-run cycles should improve programmers' productivity."

Also notable with Mold is honoring the z x86-64-v2, -z x86-64-v3, -z x86-64-v4 flags for the x86_64 micro-architecture feature levels.

Mold 2.33 also has fixes around Intel Control Flow Enforcement Technology (CET) handling, a few LoongArch fixes, and support for the --no-allow-shlib-undefined and --dynamic-list-data flags.

Downloads and more details on the Mold 2.33 linker release via GitHub.