alt Hacker NewsMold Linker Version 3.0.0 Release – Rewritten in Rust
Comments
I expected this to be a multi-months rewrite, not 3 weeks. I almost forgot we live in the agents era now.
Edit: this seems to have been cooking for a while when the first commit dropped: https://github.com/rui314/mold/commit/f41bfcd5c72ca30cce6498...
So what differentiates mold from wild now ? Is wild using different data structures?
(Wild is another fast linker, that only supports Linux)
Oh what? That was not on my bingo card for 2026. Mold already was incredible when it still was in C++ and I assume it is even better now that it is in rust
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I don't want a slop linker. Why are people selling out their projects?
It was transpiled, not rewritten, rewrite implies by hand
Damn. I thought Zig would be a perfect rewrite language for Mold since it's a better C in many ways
I'm curious about motivation - bounds checks for corrupted inputs seems like it would be one, but it also seems that fixing corrupted input handling in a C/C++ code base would not be too hard, and probably less of an effort? So why did you choose the rewrite?
And second, did you use any AI tools for the rewrite?
The linux distribution I co-maintain uses mold as our bootstrap linker to bootstrap rust itself, and it saved us -hours- on long version-by-version build chains. Mold being in c meant we could build it very early and use it as the default linker distro wide and enjoy build speedups everywhere.
Now sadly we will have to fork and maintain the c version as mold2 forever.
Rust is not actually the right tool for all problems.