I wanted to use the linker to link a Chromium executable with full debug info (~2 GiB in size) just in 1 second. LLVM’s lld¹, the fastest open-source linker which I originally created a few years ago, takes about 12 seconds to link Chromium on my machine. So the goal is 12x performance bump over lld. Compared to GNU gold, it’s more than 50x. - mold / HN

Alternative linker - choice are (linking Clang 19):
mold - the fastest so far ( 1s)
lld - previous champion ( 5s)
gold - previous attempt (33s)
ld - default from gcc (42s)

seting up mold

$ sudo apt install mold

$ sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/ld ld $(which mold) 100

Why is mold so fast?

One reason is that it utilizes faster algorithms and more efficient data structures compared to other linkers. Another reason is that mold is highly parallelized.

Here is a side-by-side comparison of per-core CPU usage for lld (left) and mold (right), linking the same program, a Chromium executable.