mold 1.0

mold 1.0 is the first stable and production-ready release of the high-speed linker. On Linux-based systems, it should "just work" as a faster drop-in replacement for the default GNU linker for most user-land programs. If you are building a large executable which takes a long time to link, mold is worth a try to see if it can shorten your build time. mold is easy to build and easy to use. For more details, see README.

mold is created by a person who knows very well as to how the Unix linker should behave, as I'm also the original creator of the current version of the LLVM lld linker.

There's no fancy new features in 1.0. Actually, 1.0 is very similar to 0.9.6. That being said, we'd like to make it clear by incrementing a major version number that mold for Linux is now stable.

Future plans

We are currently working on mold for macOS, and once it's complete, we'll release it as mold 2.0. After that, we'll work on mold for Windows and release it as 3.0.

mold 1.0's source tree has code for mold for macOS, but that's pre-alpha. Do not use it unless you know what you are doing.

Changes since mold 0.9.6

• -start-lib and -end-lib options are added for compatibility with GNU gold and LLVM lld.
• More ARM64 relocations are supported.
• Compatibility with glibc 2.2 or prior has improved. (#120)
• Compatibility with valgrind has improved. (#118)
• -Bno-symbolic option has been supported.
• -require-defined option has been supported.