Mold: A Massively Parallel Linker

(arxiv.org)

72 points | by matt_d 6 hours ago ago

9 comments

  • gabeochoa 5 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

  • dochtman 5 hours ago

    Wild is a decent bit faster than mold at this point:

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

    (Benchmarks in the README.)

    • anitil 3 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

    • vient 4 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

      • elygre 3 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_sherman 3 hours ago

      Excellent (pardon the pun!) link! :-)

  • lrvick 3 hours ago

    We use mold as the default linker in the Stagex linux distribution. It shaved hours off our full tree build time.

  • mbrumlow 3 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.

    • ahartmetz 2 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.