The paper introduces mold, a Unix/Linux linker that applies systematic data parallelism across the entire linking pipeline to address long-standing bottlenecks in large C++ build cycles. By decoupling entangled operations like symbol resolution and archive processing, mold achieves 2.4–16.1× speedup over LLVM's lld and up to 112× over GNU ld on multi-gigabyte debug binaries.
Background
Linking is a critical but often overlooked bottleneck in software build pipelines, especially for large C++ projects where edit-compile-debug cycles are dominated by link times. Existing linkers like GNU ld and LLVM lld have limited parallelism due to architectural constraints around symbol resolution and archive processing.
- Source
- Lobsters
- Published
- Aug 26, 2026 at 01:09 PM
- Score
- 7.0 / 10