Mold High Speed Linker Being Rewritten In Rust, Hopes To Be The Default Linker On Linux
Curated from Phoronix
This represents a significant shift in systems software development, showing how modern languages like Rust can address long-standing performance bottlenecks in foundational tools. While mold's performance gains are well-documented, the real value lies in its potential to standardize a critical build component across distributions. For SREs managing large-scale deployments, understanding this transition helps anticipate toolchain changes that could impact build times and system consistency. The move toward Rust also reflects broader industry trends toward memory-safe systems programming. Practitioners should monitor how this affects their build pipelines and consider how default linker changes might impact existing infrastructure dependencies.
The Mold high performance linker that typically outperforms the likes of LLVM lld, GNU LD, Wild, and others is being rewritten in the Rust programming language and also has an ambitious goal of being adopted as the default linker on Linux systems...
— Phoronix