5 ms·

Apple and Microsoft should really throw some money at Rui; Mold is a massive improvement to developer experience, and the sooner it's ported to their platforms

Apple and Microsoft should really throw some money at Rui; Mold is a massive improvement to developer experience, and the sooner it's ported to their platforms the better. I find myself defaulting to Linux for Rust development these days, mostly because Mold makes the inner loop of development so much faster.

wyldfire 4y ago
Rui has made it explicit that a commercial license is available. Hey Rui, you should replace "please call" with a dollar amount in order to increase your conversion rate ;)
- rui314 4y ago
  I dislike "contact us for pricing" too, but pricing is hard! I don't know how much I should ask for. This is also a bit unusual business model because mold can be used for free. I'm happy if users pay me 10%-20% of the total cost they could save by using mold though.
  - ksec 4y ago
    I sort of wish Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Facebook all contribute $200K each and say hey can you now make Mold MIT or BSD.
    - forty 4y ago
      What's wrong with the current agpl license, especially for a linker?
      - kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
        Corporations don't understand the GPL and how isolated, unmodified tools aren't viral.
        vbezhenar 4y ago
        That sounds strange. Corporations hire enough lawyers to find every possible loophole in tax evasion.
        TingPing 4y ago
        It's hard to quantify software costs sometimes and just saying avoid copyleft is an easy rule.
    - rui314 4y ago
      $200K is nowadays an annual total compensation of a junior dev. I believe mold values much more than a one year outcome of a typical 5-person junior dev team.
      - ksec 4y ago
        I am sorry I was not trying to undermine the value of Mold. I was told the average / median of Junior Dev are't even $200K in FAANG. But then I dont work in the US so I dont know. ( I hope more US companies are opened to truly remote )
        rui314 4y ago
        I didn't take it as an offense, so don't say sorry! I just wanted to say that if a senior dev wants to earn $1M in a few years, they can just find a job and do whatever assigned to them there. They didn't have to take a risk of starting a completely new ambitious open-source project to earn that much.
      - 1f60c 4y ago
        > $200K is nowadays an annual total compensation of a junior dev *in the US. In my country, those salaries are completely unheard of.
        5e92cb50239222b 4y ago
        In my country, $200k is what a senior dev makes in 10 years. The issue is, I very much doubt people like Rui could be expected to live in places like mine. So comparing against US salaries is probably what you should do anyway.
        IshKebab 4y ago
        I'm curious - is that salary difference enough to cause a significant brain drain? Can you hire really good developers for that price in your country? I live in the UK and dev salaries are maybe half of the US, but people don't leave in droves because there are other factors - family, friends, quality of life, effort of moving your life across continents, etc.
  - wyldfire 4y ago
    I was joking and I don't think you need a price on there. But if you're serious, you can put out an asking price and everyone involved should just assume it's negotiable. Just use something like a couple of million USD as a starting point. > This is also a bit unusual business model because mold can be used for free. You're selling the copyright, right? That's ok - businesses pay for stuff like this. Although I wonder if instead you'd be better off if you created a corporation and instead offered to sell the company's IP + your commitment to support the work over ~1-2 years. This might be a more common scenario for M&A teams to work with. Especially if you are keen on supporting more target architectures/OSs. Someone like ARM or SiFive or FAANG would easily shell out that kind of money to get mold.
  - saghm 4y ago
    Build times are a huge issue impacting how fast I can develop at my job (and I'm fairly certain that's the norm for my team), and I suspect that using a faster linker would mitigate that by a significant chunk. Unfortunately I'm just an IC and don't have the authority to look into something like paying for this, and I'd likely need to actually try it out and show numbers for how much things would improve to get management interested in actually looking into this. Because the project I work on requires interfacing with some cloud services that I can't connect to locally, I would either need to actually build on one of our cloud servers or compile the entire thing locally and copy it over, but I imagine the performance gains from multithreading would not be nearly as great on the 8 cores on my laptop compared to the 64 on my cloud server. I'm a bit hesitant to take initiative and just try this out due to the AGPL license though, since IANAL and I imagine if I tried to get permission for this internally, I'd run into the circular issue that without data to show it's worth it to look into, I'd probably just be told not to do it. Basically, I think your best chance of generating interest from this is the bottom-up (since the individual engineers are the ones who would be feeling the pain that this could help solve), but I'm not really sure ICs at the companies large enough to be potential customers for this have any likely path forward with the way you've structured things right now. I'm not sure if you're flexible on this at all, and obviously I can't guarantee we'd get anywhere, but if you're interested in hearing more details about the potential use my team (and probably a number of other teams at my company would be able to make use if we were able to work something out), feel free to email me! Any prefix @<my username>.com will forward to my gmail.
yxhuvud 4y ago
I wish basic toolchain changes happened faster though. Regular ld is still the default on most Linux dists.
nitinreddy88 4y ago
Can you please share the link about how it helps in inner loop? Sorry, I never heard of these tools and google is not returning any useful results
- wffurr 4y ago
  https://www.google.com/search?q=mold+linker https://www.google.com/search?q=mold+linker
- mort96 4y ago
  It's not really something you can "link" to tho? But the basic loop of development in most cases (in compiled languages) is making a code change, then building the software (or tests), and then running the software (or tests) to check that your change did what it was supposed to do. Building the software is divided into two steps; compiling your source files into object files, then linking those object files together into an executable. As a project grows, the time taken by the compile step in this development loop stays roughly constant; if you only change a single source file, only that source file has to be recompiled. However, the link step has to link together all your object files, from scratch, every time, so the time taken by the link step grows roughly linearly as the project size grows. Since mainstream linkers are fairly slows, an incremental build of huge projects is generally dominated by the link step. I've personally experienced the pain of making a small change to Chromium, waiting a second or so for the source file I changed to be recompiled, then waiting a minute or two for the linker to go through every single object file and produce the final executable. Mold would have reduced the build time in the development loop from minutes to seconds. I hope that helped.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

wyldfire 4y ago

Rui has made it explicit that a commercial license is available. Hey Rui, you should replace "please call" with a dollar amount in order to increase your conversion rate ;)

rui314 4y ago
I dislike "contact us for pricing" too, but pricing is hard! I don't know how much I should ask for. This is also a bit unusual business model because mold can be used for free. I'm happy if users pay me 10%-20% of the total cost they could save by using mold though.
- ksec 4y ago
  I sort of wish Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Facebook all contribute $200K each and say hey can you now make Mold MIT or BSD.
  - forty 4y ago
    What's wrong with the current agpl license, especially for a linker?
    - kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
      Corporations don't understand the GPL and how isolated, unmodified tools aren't viral.
      - vbezhenar 4y ago
        That sounds strange. Corporations hire enough lawyers to find every possible loophole in tax evasion.
        TingPing 4y ago
        It's hard to quantify software costs sometimes and just saying avoid copyleft is an easy rule.
  - rui314 4y ago
    $200K is nowadays an annual total compensation of a junior dev. I believe mold values much more than a one year outcome of a typical 5-person junior dev team.
    - ksec 4y ago
      I am sorry I was not trying to undermine the value of Mold. I was told the average / median of Junior Dev are't even $200K in FAANG. But then I dont work in the US so I dont know. ( I hope more US companies are opened to truly remote )
      - rui314 4y ago
        I didn't take it as an offense, so don't say sorry! I just wanted to say that if a senior dev wants to earn $1M in a few years, they can just find a job and do whatever assigned to them there. They didn't have to take a risk of starting a completely new ambitious open-source project to earn that much.
    - 1f60c 4y ago
      > $200K is nowadays an annual total compensation of a junior dev *in the US. In my country, those salaries are completely unheard of.
      - 5e92cb50239222b 4y ago
        In my country, $200k is what a senior dev makes in 10 years. The issue is, I very much doubt people like Rui could be expected to live in places like mine. So comparing against US salaries is probably what you should do anyway.
        IshKebab 4y ago
        I'm curious - is that salary difference enough to cause a significant brain drain? Can you hire really good developers for that price in your country? I live in the UK and dev salaries are maybe half of the US, but people don't leave in droves because there are other factors - family, friends, quality of life, effort of moving your life across continents, etc.
- wyldfire 4y ago
  I was joking and I don't think you need a price on there. But if you're serious, you can put out an asking price and everyone involved should just assume it's negotiable. Just use something like a couple of million USD as a starting point. > This is also a bit unusual business model because mold can be used for free. You're selling the copyright, right? That's ok - businesses pay for stuff like this. Although I wonder if instead you'd be better off if you created a corporation and instead offered to sell the company's IP + your commitment to support the work over ~1-2 years. This might be a more common scenario for M&A teams to work with. Especially if you are keen on supporting more target architectures/OSs. Someone like ARM or SiFive or FAANG would easily shell out that kind of money to get mold.
- saghm 4y ago
  Build times are a huge issue impacting how fast I can develop at my job (and I'm fairly certain that's the norm for my team), and I suspect that using a faster linker would mitigate that by a significant chunk. Unfortunately I'm just an IC and don't have the authority to look into something like paying for this, and I'd likely need to actually try it out and show numbers for how much things would improve to get management interested in actually looking into this. Because the project I work on requires interfacing with some cloud services that I can't connect to locally, I would either need to actually build on one of our cloud servers or compile the entire thing locally and copy it over, but I imagine the performance gains from multithreading would not be nearly as great on the 8 cores on my laptop compared to the 64 on my cloud server. I'm a bit hesitant to take initiative and just try this out due to the AGPL license though, since IANAL and I imagine if I tried to get permission for this internally, I'd run into the circular issue that without data to show it's worth it to look into, I'd probably just be told not to do it. Basically, I think your best chance of generating interest from this is the bottom-up (since the individual engineers are the ones who would be feeling the pain that this could help solve), but I'm not really sure ICs at the companies large enough to be potential customers for this have any likely path forward with the way you've structured things right now. I'm not sure if you're flexible on this at all, and obviously I can't guarantee we'd get anywhere, but if you're interested in hearing more details about the potential use my team (and probably a number of other teams at my company would be able to make use if we were able to work something out), feel free to email me! Any prefix @<my username>.com will forward to my gmail.

yxhuvud 4y ago

I wish basic toolchain changes happened faster though. Regular ld is still the default on most Linux dists.

nitinreddy88 4y ago

Can you please share the link about how it helps in inner loop? Sorry, I never heard of these tools and google is not returning any useful results

wffurr 4y ago
https://www.google.com/search?q=mold+linker https://www.google.com/search?q=mold+linker
mort96 4y ago
It's not really something you can "link" to tho? But the basic loop of development in most cases (in compiled languages) is making a code change, then building the software (or tests), and then running the software (or tests) to check that your change did what it was supposed to do. Building the software is divided into two steps; compiling your source files into object files, then linking those object files together into an executable. As a project grows, the time taken by the compile step in this development loop stays roughly constant; if you only change a single source file, only that source file has to be recompiled. However, the link step has to link together all your object files, from scratch, every time, so the time taken by the link step grows roughly linearly as the project size grows. Since mainstream linkers are fairly slows, an incremental build of huge projects is generally dominated by the link step. I've personally experienced the pain of making a small change to Chromium, waiting a second or so for the source file I changed to be recompiled, then waiting a minute or two for the linker to go through every single object file and produce the final executable. Mold would have reduced the build time in the development loop from minutes to seconds. I hope that helped.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]