r/programming • u/mttd • 6d ago

mold: A Massively Parallel Linker

https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.23228
232 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

35 comments sorted by

152

u/Farlo1 6d ago

mold has been around for years, I’m curious why there’s a paper being published about it now. Does academia just take that long?

82

u/AresFowl44 6d ago

Maybe they wanted to get the project into a somewhat acceptable state before publishing a paper on it? Especially when talking about the performance of something it can be hard to compare with mature projects otherwise

28

u/syklemil 5d ago

According to a comment in /r/cpp the author'll be holding a conference talk on it soon

14

u/cn-ml 5d ago

This is the first time I have ever seen someone use x'll with something else than pronouns.

5

u/scribe-kiddie 4d ago

And i didn't even notice it. That bastard!

5

u/OSS-Corpo-Shit 3d ago

It definitely verbally happens a lot. I’ll concur that I’ven’t ever seen’er typed!

3

u/Sigmatics 3d ago

r'll just rolls the tongue

2

u/tending 4d ago

It's pretty common in English, at least in American English can't speak for other regions

1

u/DynamicHunter 2d ago

Y’ain’t never seen a triple or quadruple contraction before have you? (Y’ain’t = y’all ain’t = you all are not)

1

u/Full-Spectral 1d ago

Sometimes people'll just do that.

-38

u/ChemicalRascal 6d ago

Putting up a preprint on arxiv certainly doesn't take that long.

96

u/cbarrick 6d ago

The act of clicking upload? Seconds.

The act of producing valuable research worth writing about? Takes a bit longer.

0

u/ChemicalRascal 6d ago

Oh, certainly, but generally when someone says "academia" I find, or at least think, they're referring to the process of getting a paper through review and publishing, not the act of doing the research.

73

u/bzbub2 6d ago

"An ablation study shows that no single optimization dominates; the speedup comes from the cumulative effect of parallelizing all passes." this is a cool finding

18

u/tuxwonder 6d ago

Wonder if this tech, or the linker itself, will ever come to Windows MSVC builds. I can dream...

4

u/ioneska 5d ago

LLD? radlink?

2

u/tuxwonder 5d ago

I don't know what those words mean and my googling failed to find something

13

u/ioneska 5d ago

They are highly compatible with the MSVC linker and might be more performant in some cases.

10

u/atrocia6 5d ago

https://github.com/EpicGames/raddebugger#the-rad-linker

TIL that Epic Games, of all people, develop cutting edge, open source development tools!

11

u/Immotommi 5d ago

Epic acquired a game tooling company, Rad game tools in 2021. The company still exists inside of Epic and some proportion of their work is open source, for example the rad debugger

2

u/atrocia6 4d ago

Ah, okay, so they don't have a homegrown OSS operation - my understanding of the world is not totally upended :| But I'm happy to still give them credit for at least maintaining interesting open source projects.

1

u/tuxwonder 5d ago

Thanks, I'll check them out!

6

u/Ameisen 5d ago

The third hit for lld is the linker... if you'd searched for lld link then it'd be the first.

8

u/PreciselyWrong 5d ago

mold is old and also sold. Wild is the newsworthy linker

11

u/VictoryMotel 5d ago

Make a post about it.

1

u/takanuva 4d ago

He should make a paper about it.

6

u/SethDusek5 4d ago

Both of them are good projects and choosing between one is splitting hairs since they perform similarly, Wild wins in some benchmarks and mold wins in others. Also Rui has been doing this for a long time and it seems to mostly be a one-man operation which is super impressive and I definitely plan on reading this paper.

What would make Wild truly more newsworthy is if they achieve their goal of incremental linking one day, from what I remember they still haven't.

1

u/artyomsv 5d ago

For me biggest win was not raw speed but that link stopped being the thing I wait for in debug loop. After switching, bottleneck just moved to compile step, so total build time gain is always smaller than linker benchmark promise. Paper numbers look nice but people forget this part.

3

u/max123246 3d ago

So raw speed...

3

u/artyomsv 2d ago

Fair, that was badly put by me. What I meant is link speedup and total build speedup are two different numbers, 100x on the link step turns into small change end to end once compile dominates, and the paper reports the first one.

-8

u/-1_0 6d ago

112x ... wow ... C++ will be JIT language /s

1

u/tim-hilt 6d ago

With this tool more like JIL 😅

12

u/Nicksaurus 5d ago

Just In Lime?

0

u/-Redstoneboi- 5d ago

just in link