Mold (linker) 1.0 released

Posted Dec 16, 2021 0:27 UTC (Thu) by rillian (subscriber, #11344)
In reply to: Mold (linker) 1.0 released by Vipketsh
Parent article: Mold (linker) 1.0 released

Well, most of it is probably debug tables. You'll note the release downloads are ~10% that size.

These are also huge programs. According to tokei on today's main branches:

firefox 37M lines of code (3M C, 6M C++, 4M headers, 8M Javascript, 3M Rust)
chromium 36M lines (14M C++, 5M headers, 4M Javascript)
linux 32M lines (21M C, 7M headers)

Browsers are effectively an entire userspace unto themselves, so it's not surprising builds are the same size as a minimal desktop image.

Otherwise, what mathstuf said. Link times on large C++ applications can be a real bottleneck, especially for incremental development. Linux has the advantage of being in C, and more modular.

Mold (linker) 1.0 released

Posted Dec 16, 2021 12:47 UTC (Thu) by cesarb (subscriber, #6266) [Link] (1 responses)

> Linux has the advantage of being in C, and more modular.

Linux also heavily uses partial linking (ld -r), which allows a large part of the linking step to run incrementally and/or in parallel. That does not seem to be usual for other large C or C++ projects I've seen.

Mold (linker) 1.0 released

Posted Dec 16, 2021 14:28 UTC (Thu) by Vipketsh (guest, #134480) [Link]

In my 5.12 kernel tree that seems to have been changed to use the more conventional method of archives.

Even with 'ld -r' the symbol lookup does not get eliminated during the final link which is, according to the documentation here, one of the slowest part of linking, so I doubt that using 'ld -r' has a meaningful impact on linking speed.