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Rust Programming @lemmy.ml Gargari @lemmy.ml

Did you try Mold?

According to the readme, Rust is supported, did anyone tried and noticed improvement? rui314/mold: Mold: A Modern Linker 🦠 https://github.com/rui314/mold

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  • codegen-units=1, debug=true, varying lto

    lto = "fat"

    Flags Clean build time Pre-strip size Post-strip size
    (default) 2:31 90.8207MiB 7.3374MiB
    ["-Z", "gcc-ld=lld"] 2:31 91.9731MiB 7.3332MiB
    linker = "clang" 2:32 90.8207MiB 7.3375MiB
    linker = "clang"; fuse-ld="mold" 2:31 92.1107MiB 7.3334MiB

    lto = "thin"

    Flags Clean build time Pre-strip size Post-strip size
    (default) 1:33 96.9630MiB 8.1695MiB
    ["-Z", "gcc-ld=lld"] 1:32 98.3889MiB 8.1777MiB
    linker = "clang" 1:33 96.9631MiB 8.1695MiB
    linker = "clang"; fuse-ld="mold" 1:32 98.6903MiB 8.1797MiB

    lto = false

    Flags Clean build time Pre-strip size Post-strip size
    (default) 1:32 113.5656MiB 8.0601MiB
    ["-Z", "gcc-ld=lld"] 1:30 115.1210MiB 8.1122MiB
    linker = "clang" 1:32 113.5656MiB 8.0602MiB
    linker = "clang"; fuse-ld="mold" 1:31 115.4679MiB 8.0663MiB

    lto = "off"

    Flags Clean build time Pre-strip size Post-strip size
    (default) 1:33 113.5666MiB 8.0601MiB
    ["-Z", "gcc-ld=lld"] 1:31 115.1231MiB 8.1122MiB
    linker = "clang" 1:32 113.5667MiB 8.0602MiB
    linker = "clang"; fuse-ld="mold" 1:31 115.4697MiB 8.0662MiB

    codegen-units=8, debug=true, varying lto

    lto = "fat"

    Flags Clean build time Pre-strip size Post-strip size
    (default) 2:21 104.9842MiB 7.6304MiB
    ["-Z", "gcc-ld=lld"] 2:19 106.1436MiB 7.6264MiB
    linker = "clang" 2:21 104.9882MiB 7.6344MiB
    linker = "clang"; fuse-ld="mold" 2:19 106.2864MiB 7.6325MiB

    lto = "thin"

    Flags Clean build time Pre-strip size Post-strip size
    (default) 1:12 134.1112MiB 9.0445MiB
    ["-Z", "gcc-ld=lld"] 1:09 136.1897MiB 9.0660MiB
    linker = "clang" 1:12 134.1113MiB 9.0446MiB
    linker = "clang"; fuse-ld="mold" 1:09 136.4466MiB 9.0494MiB

    lto = false

    Flags Clean build time Pre-strip size Post-strip size
    (default) 1:14 158.1049MiB 9.0328MiB
    ["-Z", "gcc-ld=lld"] 1:11 159.9998MiB 9.1129MiB
    linker = "clang" 1:14 158.1050MiB 9.0328MiB
    linker = "clang"; fuse-ld="mold" 1:12 160.3123MiB 9.0428MiB

    lto = "off"

    Flags Clean build time Pre-strip size Post-strip size
    (default) 0:57 145.9463MiB 9.4586MiB
    ["-Z", "gcc-ld=lld"] 0:54 148.6021MiB 9.6001MiB
    linker = "clang" 0:57 145.9464MiB 9.4587MiB
    linker = "clang"; fuse-ld="mold" 0:55 148.8842MiB 9.4668MiB

    mold appears to be similar but not faster than lld.

    With the caveat that this is not a proper benchmark since:

    • I didn't measure link time alone.
    • I didn't bother running each case multiple times picking the fastest run (since I perceived the differences to be insignificant).

    And a side note, lto = false appears to be practically useless.

      1. With a total build time of less than 2 minutes, my guess is that link time is fairly small. At work we have a c++ project that takes around 40 minutes to build. Only in the incremental case does link time dominate (upwards of 10 seconds with gold, haven't tried lld or mold).

      2. My understanding is that mold supposedly has more scalable data structures and algorithms (better complexity). Thus for small links there likely will be little difference. So you need to measure it on your actual use case to see if it makes a difference.

      3. mold supposedly can take more advantage of multi core. How many cores did you run on? Again this will likely not show for small links, since there is also overhead in splitting work across threads.

      • Okay. I updated mold to v2.0.0. Added "-Z", "time-passes" to get link times, ran cargo with --timings to get CPU utilization graphs. Tested on two projects of mine (the one from yesterday is "X").

        Link times are picked as the best from 3-4 runs, changing only white space on main.rs.

        lto="fat" lld mold
        project X (cu=1) 105.923 106.380
        Project X (cu=8) 103.512 103.513
        Project S (cu=1) 94.290 94.969
        Project S (cu=8) 100.118 100.449

        Observations (lto="fat"): As expected, not a lot of utilization of multi-core. Using codegen-units larger than 1 may even cause a regression in link time. Choice of linker between lld and mold appears to be of no significance.

        lto="thin" lld mold
        project X (cu=1) 46.596 47.118
        Project X (cu=8) 34.167 33.839
        Project X (cu=16) 36.296 36.621
        Project S (cu=1) 41.817 41.404
        Project S (cu=8) 32.062 32.162
        Project S (cu=16) 35.780 36.074

        Observations (lto="thin"): Here, we see parallel LLVM_lto_optimize runs kicking in. Testing with codegen-units=16 was also done. In that case, the number of parallel LLVM_lto_optimize runs was so big, the synchronization overhead caused a regression running that test on a humble workstation powered by an Intel i7-7700K processor (4 physical, 8 logical cores only). The results will probably look different running this test case (cu=16) in a more powerful setup. But still, the choice of linker between lld and mold appears to be of no significance.

        lto=false lld mold
        project X (cu=1) 29.160 29.231
        Project X (cu=8) 8.130 8.293
        Project X (cu=16) 7.076 6.953
        Project S (cu=1) 11.996 12.069
        Project S (cu=8) 4.418 4.462
        Project S (cu=16) 4.357 4.455

        Observations (lto=false): Here, codegen-units becomes the dominant factor with no heavy LLVM_lto_optimize runs involved. Going above codegen-units=8 does not hurt link time. Still, the choice of linker between lld and mold appears to be of no significance.

        lto="off" lld mold
        project X (cu=1) 29.109 29.201
        Project X (cu=8) 5.896 6.117
        Project X (cu=16) 3.479 3.637
        Project S (cu=1) 11.732 11.742
        Project S (cu=8) 2.354 2.355
        Project S (cu=16) 1.517 1.499

        Observations (lto="off"): Same observations as lto=false. Still, the choice of linker between lld and mold appears to be of no significance.

        Debug builds link in <.4 seconds.

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