AI's coding ability is truly amazing. We've spent decades inventing languages, tools, and methodologies to help us write better code more efficiently, but AI-assisted coding is the biggest breakthrough in programming productivity I've seen in my lifetime. It's genuinely incredible.

Using the final mold 2.x release as a bootstrap-only linker and then replacing it with mold 3 once Rust is available seems like the most practical compromise.

Before I created lld, linking was much slower than it is today, and people somehow seemed to accept that as a given. People would often argue that since linking was slow, we needed to reduce the amount of linking work by implementing incremental linking. I thought that was too pessimistic. Why don't we just make the usual full link much faster, ideally almost as fast as a cp command, so that we don't need incremental linking nearly as much?

In other words, I wanted to solve the slow link problem head-on rather than work around linker slowness. And now we can link multi-gigabyte binaries in a second or two, which makes incremental linking much less urgent than it was ten years ago. That's pretty much what I wanted to achieve.

Am I satisfied with the speed? No. Could incremental linking speed it up even more? Maybe. Would it still be useful? Sure. It may well be worth doing. But people don't need it nearly as badly as they did ten years ago. I wanted to solve the larger problem first.

Essentially, yes, but that’s because Apple’s new linker is so much faster than it was. You can use it instead.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33594556

Points: 9

# Comments: 0

So the chibicc book is not available yet. I'm busy working on the other project (the mold linker) and don't have time to work on it. That being said, I believe the repo is still very valuable for those who want to learn how easy it is to implement a simple C compiler. chibicc's each commit was carefully written so that you can read one commit at a time. I'd recommend starting from the initial commit and observe how each feature (`if`, `for`, local variables, global variables, etc.) is implemented by following each commit.