3 ms·

Mold is absolutely excellent work for modern systems. I've recently been trying to speed up our project builds, and found that linking is absolutely a huge bot

Mold is absolutely excellent work for modern systems. I've recently been trying to speed up our project builds, and found that linking is absolutely a huge bottleneck. I've got 24 cores * 2 threads to build on, and maybe 30% of that power goes unused because of the linker. I've made a previous attempt to build with mold but it didn't quite work at the time. I'll be giving it another try.

sho_hn 3y ago
We've also done some PoCs at work, and the total build time for our UI layer (complex C++/Qt stuff) dropped from 44-45 mins to 29 by going from lld to mold on a smaller test build machine.
bogwog 3y ago
Mold is amazing. I was playing around with O3DE some months ago, and tried switching to Mold to see if it could improve my build-run cycle times, and it absolutely did. I don't remember the exact numbers, but it was something crazy like multiple seconds with gold and lld, down to under a second with mold.
- kaashif 3y ago
  Multiple seconds...I've worked on binaries that take 20 minutes to link. Having a ridiculously long cycle time massacres productivity and job satisfaction.
  - itsTyrion 3y ago
    TWENTY minutes? O_o what kinda software/binary was that if you don't mind me asking?
    - maccard 3y ago
      I'm not OP but I've worked on projects with similar link times. Large games that are one monolithic executable and have enormous debug information filed (sym or pdb depending on platform). Heres a good blog post [0]. [0] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/improved-linker-fundamentals-in-visual-studio-2019/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/improved-linker-funda...
    - lovasoa 3y ago
      Not the OP either, but I also had terrible link times in SQLPage before I switched to mold. SQLPage is a web server that bundles a lot of html component templates directly in the server binary. This is very practical for users, but was painful for developers, before mold.
    - 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
      I've seen linking take that long or longer when I worked in defense. :)
    - kaashif 3y ago
      Something big, decades old, financial. Not pleasant.
unfamiliar 3y ago
`mold -run ninja` works really well for me.

sho_hn 3y ago

We've also done some PoCs at work, and the total build time for our UI layer (complex C++/Qt stuff) dropped from 44-45 mins to 29 by going from lld to mold on a smaller test build machine.

bogwog 3y ago

Mold is amazing. I was playing around with O3DE some months ago, and tried switching to Mold to see if it could improve my build-run cycle times, and it absolutely did. I don't remember the exact numbers, but it was something crazy like multiple seconds with gold and lld, down to under a second with mold.

kaashif 3y ago
Multiple seconds...I've worked on binaries that take 20 minutes to link. Having a ridiculously long cycle time massacres productivity and job satisfaction.
- itsTyrion 3y ago
  TWENTY minutes? O_o what kinda software/binary was that if you don't mind me asking?
  - maccard 3y ago
    I'm not OP but I've worked on projects with similar link times. Large games that are one monolithic executable and have enormous debug information filed (sym or pdb depending on platform). Heres a good blog post [0]. [0] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/improved-linker-fundamentals-in-visual-studio-2019/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/improved-linker-funda...
  - lovasoa 3y ago
    Not the OP either, but I also had terrible link times in SQLPage before I switched to mold. SQLPage is a web server that bundles a lot of html component templates directly in the server binary. This is very practical for users, but was painful for developers, before mold.
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
    I've seen linking take that long or longer when I worked in defense. :)
  - kaashif 3y ago
    Something big, decades old, financial. Not pleasant.

unfamiliar 3y ago

`mold -run ninja` works really well for me.