mold: A massively parallel linker
The mold linker applies data parallelism across the entire ELF linking pipeline instead of leaving most cores idle, reporting 2.4–16.1× lower link times than lld and up to 112× over GNU ld on large real-world programs.
The paper identifies entangled symbol resolution and archive processing as barriers in existing linkers. mold eagerly parses every input and archive member in parallel, then resolves symbols in a separate parallel pass using concurrent data structures and atomic compare-and-swap. Its ablation study attributes the gains to parallelizing the whole pipeline rather than one magic optimization. The Lobsters submission had no comments during review.