Mold 3.0 High Speed Linker Released Following Rust Rewrite

The Mold high speed linker alternative to the likes of GNU Gold/LD and LLVM LLD recently has been going through a rewrite from C++ to Rust as well as having high ambitions of eventually becoming the default linker on Linux systems. Today marks the release of Mold 3.0 for this Rust-based high performance linker.

Mold 3.0 is said to be a drop-in replacement to Mold 2.42.1 as the prior stable release, albeit now written in the Rust programming language rather than C++. With Mold 3.x the main focus is on addressing remaining compatibility gaps with GNU LD:

"mold 3.0.0 is a new major release of the high-speed linker. As we announced in the 2.42.1 release notes, we have rewritten mold from C++ to Rust, and this is the first release of the Rust version. 2.42.1 is the last release of the C++ version. The goal of mold 3.x is to close the remaining compatibility gaps with GNU ld, particularly in linker script support, and to pave the way for mold to be adopted as the default linker in Linux distributions."

In using the Rust programming language, Mold 3.0 is said to be safer when dealing with corrupted input files. Mold 3.0 depends on Rust 1.95 or later, avoids the dependency now on Intel oneTBB, and is using Rust's Cargo build system rather than CMake.

In the process of the Mold 3.0 Rust rewrite, many bugs are said to have been fixed with this new version. The full list of fixes and other details on Mold 3.0 via this morning's release announcement.