Mold 2.36 Linker Brings More Optimizations & Compatibility Improvements

Rui Ueyama released Mold 2.36 as the newest update to this open-source linker that aims to deliver maximum performance at all costs.

New performance optimizations for Mold 2.36 benefit ARM and PowerPC with linking Clang 19 now being around 7% faster on ARM64, for example. RISC-V and LoongArch have also seen improvements where RISC-V is now around 4% faster linking Clang compared to prior releases.

The Mold linker also has a new "--package-metadata=" option that can be used to embed a given string into the ".note.package" section of the binary. The intent here is for build scripts generating binary packages such as for RPMs and DEBs to be able to include package metadata in each executable.

Mold 2.36 also has a number of bug fixes and compatibility improvements -- mostly for alternative architectures like RISC-V, LoongArch, and s390x.

Mold 2.36 downloads and more details on this updated open-source linker via GitHub.