Wild – A fast linker for Linux
https://github.com/davidlattimore/wildCan someone explain what is so special about Rust for this?
https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch16-00-concurrency.html
So the logic would go:
1. mold doesn't do incremental linking because it is too complex to do it while still being fast (concurrent).
2. Rust makes it possible to write very complex fast (concurrent) programs.
3. A new linker written in Rust can do incremental linking while still being fast (concurrent).
EDIT: I meant this originally, but comments were posted before I added it so I want to be clear that this part is new: (Any of those three could be false; I take no strong position on that. But I believe that this is the motivating logic.)
You could, for example, take advantage of bump arena allocator in rust which would allow the linker to have just 1 alloc/dealloc. Mold is still using more traditional allocators under the covers which won't be as fast as a bump allocator. (Nothing would stop mold from doing the same).
Really it's allocators in general. Allocations are perceived as expensive only because they are mostly dependent on the amortized cost of prior deallocations. As an extreme example, even GCs can be fast if you avoid deallocation because most typically have a long-lived object heap that rarely gets collected - so if you keep things around that can be long-lived (pooling) their cost mostly goes away.
Allocation is perceived as slow because it is. Getting memory from the OS is somewhat expensive because a page of memory needs to be allocated and stored off. Getting memory from traditional allocators is expensive because freespace needs to be tracked. When you say "I need 5 bytes" the allocator needs to find 5 free bytes to give back to you.
Bump allocators are fast because the operation of "I need 5 bytes" is incrementing the allocation pointer forward by 5 bytes and maybe doing a new page allocation if that's exhausted.
GC allocators are fast because they are generally bump allocators! The only difference is that when exhaustion happens the GC says "I need to run a GC".
Traditional allocators are a bit slower because they are typically something like an arena with skiplists used to find free space. When you free up memory, that skiplist needs to be updated.
But further, unlike bump and GC allocators another fault of traditional allocators is they have a tendency to scatter memory which has a negative impact on CPU cache performance. With the assumption that related memory tends to be allocated at the same time, GCs and bump allocators will colocate memory. But, because of the skiplist, traditional allocators will scattershot allocations to avoid free memory fragmentation.
All this said, for most apps this doesn't matter a whole lot. However, if you are doing a CPU/memory intense operation then this is stuff to know.
If you've never deallocated then there is no free space to track, hence the cost of allocation is _mostly_ (per my above comment) affected by the amortized cost of deallocations. The cost becomes extremely apparent with GCs because a failed allocation is usually what triggers a collection (and subsequently any deallocations that need to happen).
Still, your comment goes into detail that I probably should have.
Also, if wild is indeed faster than mold even without incrementalism, as the benchmarks show, then it seems quite silly to go around making the argument that it's harder to write a fast linker in Rust. It's apparently not that hard.
Also see various arena allocator crates, etc.
And if you intentionally leak everything it is onerous to get the borrow checker to realize that unless you use a leaked box for all declaration/allocations, which introduces both friction and performance regressions (due to memory access patterns) because the use of custom allocators doesn’t factor into lifetime analysis.
(Spoken as a die-hard rust dev that still thinks it’s the better language than zig for most everything.)
ManuallyDrop would presumably be implemented on large data structures where it matters, not on every single type involved in the program.
1. Rust's well designed type system and borrow checker makes writing code that works just easier. It has the "if it compiles it works" property (not unique to Rust; people say this about e.g. Haskell too).
2. Rust's type system - especially its trait system can be used to enforce safety constraints statically. The obvious one is the Send and Sync traits for thread safety, but there are others, e.g. the Fuchsia network code statically guarantees deadlocks are impossible.
Mold is written in C++ which is extremely error prone in comparison.
Linking is often a very notable bottleneck for debug binaries and mold can make a big difference.
So interest in speeding up linking for Rust is expected.
By the way I had to lookup what incremental linking is, in practice I think it means that code from libraries and modules that have not changed won’t need to be re-packed each time which ch will save time for frequent development builds, it’s actually ingenious