This is a wonderful paper that includes many optimization tricks that are generally applicable, including various optimizations that they retrofitted into lld. But I thought there was one meta optimization that was especially interesting (from page 2):

> A new linker's early adopters knowingly accept such differences, which is one reason why drastic improvements tend to come from new linkers rather than existing ones

This is true of many things, not just linkers. I think this is encouraging for people to (re)try things that have already been done, because newcomers are allowed to take risks that established things can't take.

Old tweet from Rui, but I saw it in a recent zig video and really liked the sentiment:

(https://x.com/rui314/status/1560277403787997185)

> my strategy is to increase the value of commons by, say, 100 and get 1 as a return, so bear with me. If you want to use mold for free, you can just do that. This is my open-source business strategy.

Wishing the best for Mold and Rui

Wild is a decent bit faster than mold at this point:

https://github.com/wild-linker/wild

(Benchmarks in the README.)

  Mold is already very fast, however it doesn't do incremental linking and the author has stated that they don't intend to.

We use mold as the default linker in the Stagex linux distribution. It shaved hours off our full tree build time.

Would use this at a fairly large company if we had windows and Mac support, probably could get budget to pay for the features it’s missing.