lld developer Rui Ueyama has released Mold 1.0, a new linker alternative to GNUs Gold and LLVM’s lld. With version 1.0, a software project is generally considered stable and can be used without hesitation. Mold currently runs on Linux systems, support for macOS and Windows is planned.
Faster thanks to faster algorithms
LLVM is a compiler architecture that is used in Linux and FreeBSD, among others. LLVM lld is an alternative to the GNU tools ld and gold. The linker alternative Mold (English for “mold”, which is recognizable in the logo) does not offer any new linker functions compared to lld or gold, but it should be noticeably faster.
The reason for the higher speed is apparently the algorithms and the data structures. According to the GitHub post, Mold is multi-core / thread-friendly and has several optimizations to increase parallelism. The repository on GitHub has a graphic to illustrate the performance. GNU gold, LLVM lld and Mold are compared when linking final debuginfo-enabled executables of large programs on a simulated 16-thread machine with eight cores.
(Image: GitHub Mold)
According to Ueyama, version 2.0 can also be used on macOS systems. Windows support follows with version 3.0. More information about Mold 1.0 can be found on GitHub.
(mdo)