LLMs are very good at taking your existing structure and converting it as-is to a new language. But rewriting by hand gives you the opportunity to rethink previous design decisions or optimize the code for the new language. So I was disappointed that this appears to just be a straight port and no additional performance improvements were gained.

https://github.com/rui314/mold/releases/tag/v2.42.1

"Recent advances in AI-assisted coding have made large-scale rewrites considerably more practical, but they do not eliminate those risks, and we do not take them lightly."

Last time I checked it didn't make any difference or whatsoever when compared to lld so I would not go that far by saying "mold is a reference in the world of linkers" - made a test just few days ago on 10M LoC C++. So, rewriting the codebase in another language just because doesn't seem like an investment worth doing when there's much bigger fish to fry.

They just threw out the code base and replaced it with a vibe coded rust port.