Mold: A Massively Parallel Linker(arxiv.org)
69 pointsby matt_d5 hours ago4 comments
  • gabeochoa4 hours ago
    Old tweet from Rui, but I saw it in a recent zig video and really liked the sentiment:

    (https://x.com/rui314/status/1560277403787997185)

    > my strategy is to increase the value of commons by, say, 100 and get 1 as a return, so bear with me. If you want to use mold for free, you can just do that. This is my open-source business strategy.

    Wishing the best for Mold and Rui

  • dochtman4 hours ago
    Wild is a decent bit faster than mold at this point:

    https://github.com/wild-linker/wild

    (Benchmarks in the README.)

    • anitil2 hours ago
      I'm keen to follow along with Wild as their intent is to be incremental, and Zig recently announced incremental linking support. I'm also a fan as its cool to seen an Australian working full time on open source (I'm also Australian)

      Edit to add: I think David's talk on Wild [0] is an interesting summary of what a linker is and why its hard to make incremental

      [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSHt3-gwVxc

    • vient3 hours ago
      Rui mentioned today that he managed to speed up mold "about 1.5 times" while writing this paper https://x.com/rui314/status/2092486965186969699?s=20

      Seems that some optimizations went to mold 2.42 and others are not yet released. Wild benchmarked mold 2.40 or 2.41

      • elygre3 hours ago
        I guess this sentence from the Wild readme is also relevant:

          Mold is already very fast, however it doesn't do incremental linking and the author has stated that they don't intend to.
    • peter_d_sherman3 hours ago
      Excellent (pardon the pun!) link! :-)
  • lrvick2 hours ago
    We use mold as the default linker in the Stagex linux distribution. It shaved hours off our full tree build time.
  • mbrumlow2 hours ago
    Would use this at a fairly large company if we had windows and Mac support, probably could get budget to pay for the features it’s missing.
    • ahartmetz2 hours ago
      That sounds like you should get in contact with Rui Ueyama. If anybody asks, someone on HN said it seemed like a no-brainer.