> "Concretely speaking, I want to use the linker to link a Chromium executable (~1.8 GiB in size) just in 1 second. LLVM's lld, the fastest open-source linker which I originally created a few years ago, takes about 12 seconds to link Chromium on my machine. So the goal is 12x performance bump over lld. Compared to GNU gold, it's more than 50x."
There is good discussion as well in this prior post, and Reddit thread with the author in it a while back:
Rui Ueyama is one of the most interesting coders of our age. chibicc in particular is one of the loveliest projects I've seen. I found it so captivating that when it got posted to HN last year I dropped what I was doing for a month just to hack on it. It's rare to find codebases with enough clarity to be educational. I learned so much reading his chibicc code. For example, in a world where the orthodox solution to these kinds of things is to use Bison or Antlr, the thought never would have occurred to me before that writing a parser in C could be so easy. That's how I was able to write an assembler for it. Rui is also living proof that the will and motivation to simplify also generalizes to the ability to create production-quality tools with superior performance, as evidenced by Mold. Very exciting to see his work take off.
Yeah, but he refused to protect his unicode identifiers, and just went with the C committee solution to provide no solution to Unicode identifier security. I expected better.
He's probably talking about https://justine.lol/dox/ansic-identifiers.txt I'm not sure what he wants to see happen here but I remember him asking me for a timing safe memcmp function in Cosmopolitan a while back and it's hard to refuse a small reasonable demand.
I feel like this makes it even more confusing as to why this "drop-in replacement" is yet another new competing project rather than an upgrade/enhancement to an existing linker (such as lld)... has open source as a community concept failed so hard that people are unable to even contribute to and collectively improve projects they themselves started?
This might be a nerd-sniping question because there are lots of reasons and people will fight over which ones are most relevant. e.g. V8, rendering, myriad web protocols, security measures, etc. From my understanding at least.
Back when I was using Gentoo, Chromium was the biggest dependency on my machine, by far. When there was an update I couldn't use my machine for like 30 minutes.
That makes them the author of both of the two fastest linkers in existence, AFAIK. This person has a very impressive resume.
https://github.com/rui314/mold/blob/main/docs/design.md
There is good discussion as well in this prior post, and Reddit thread with the author in it a while back:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26233244
https://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/kxvw5c/mold_a_modern_l...