alt Hacker NewsWe use the llvm linker, lld, to link mold at the earliest point we can, then use mold exclusively after that. We are an LLVM native distro so we build llvm right away as the system compiler used to build the whole tree instead of gcc.
LLD would work fine for the whole tree, and did previously, but is much much slower than mold which is why we switched to mold.
Having to build all dependencies of rust including python and openssl and everything else before being able to use mold erases most of the full-tree build speedups as the path to rust is already about 80% of the full tree build time.
We are a distro that mandates independently verified 100% deterministic builds from source for any given release commit of the tree, so we have to build the whole tree several times for every release.
Can't you just keep using Mold2 for the initial toolchain bootstrap and then build mold3 with Rust as part of the "final" set of toolchains that are to be used to compile everything beyond that? It isn't perfect but it's congruent with how many other components in most open reproducible bootstrapping flows work; ie using GCC 4.4 or whatever just to bootstrap GCC 10. It's annoying but it only needs to be done once and then you just use it to bootstrap newer components forever. Doesn't help with compile times, though.