Linking is the slowest part of D's compilation process– can we use mold to speed it up?

[deadalnix]

On Wednesday, 24 February 2021 at 22:12:46 UTC, Atila Neves wrote:
> On Tuesday, 23 February 2021 at 14:41:59 UTC, James Lu wrote:
> The linker can be a bottleneck, yes, especially since it 
> doesn't do work in parallel. But in my experience, if the 
> linker takes a while, compiling took a lot longer still. Of 
> course, any improvements in this area are welcome, and I hope 
> mold is production-ready as soon as possible.
>

This is true for a fresh build, but often not the case for 
incremental builds, which dev often have to go through. This is 
because the work you have to do for sources grows with the size 
of the changeset, while the work you have to do link grows with 
the size of the project as a whole, changed or not. On large 
projects, it is very common that linking dominates incremental 
builds.

zld is another interesting project that tries to do enable 
incremental linking: https://github.com/kubkon/zld

Just like mold, it is fairly new and probably not battle tested 
enough for production yet.