Mold
Mold is a high-speed linker for Unix-like systems, designed to significantly reduce linking times for C/C++ projects compared to traditional linkers like GNU ld or gold. It achieves this through parallelization and efficient memory usage, making it particularly beneficial for large codebases. Mold is open-source and compatible with existing build systems, often requiring minimal configuration changes.
Developers should learn and use Mold when working on large C/C++ projects where linking times are a bottleneck, such as in game development, operating systems, or enterprise applications, as it can cut linking times from minutes to seconds. It's also useful in continuous integration/development pipelines to speed up builds, improving developer productivity and reducing wait times. Mold is a drop-in replacement for many use cases, making adoption straightforward.