● Covered by 1 source · 1 reportMedium impact1 positive
New Linker 'mold' Achieves Significant Speedup Through Parallel Processing
Key points
- mold is a new Unix/Linux linker.
- It uses data parallelism across the entire linking pipeline.
- mold is 2.4-16.1x faster than lld and up to 112x faster than GNU ld.
- It links multi-gigabyte debug binaries in seconds or less.
Introduction of mold Linker
A new linker, mold, has been introduced for Unix/Linux systems. This linker is designed to improve the speed of the software build process by addressing the bottleneck of linking, particularly for large C++ programs. It achieves this by systematically applying data parallelism.
Addressing Linking Bottlenecks
Linking is a crucial step that combines compiled object files into an executable or shared library. Traditional linkers have limited parallelism, leaving most CPU cores underutilized. mold's design overcomes architectural constraints, such as entangled symbol resolution and archive processing, by decoupling them in a clean-slate approach.
Performance Improvements
On large real-world programs, mold demonstrates substantial performance gains. It can link multi-gigabyte debug binaries in a few seconds, often under one second. This represents a 2.4 to 16.1 times speed improvement over the lld linker and up to 112 times faster performance compared to the traditional GNU ld.
Mechanism of Speedup
The significant speedup achieved by mold is not due to a single optimization but rather the cumulative effect of parallelizing all passes within the linking process. This comprehensive application of data parallelism across the entire pipeline is what differentiates mold from existing solutions.
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Primary sources
arXiv 2608.23228Reporting from
A new Unix/Linux linker named mold has been developed, which systematically applies data parallelism across the entire linking pipeline. This design allows mold to link large C++ programs significantly faster than existing linkers, addressing a bottleneck in software development.