mold is an open-source, fast, and portable linker for ELF. I'm the creator of the mold linker as well as the LLVM lld linker. It looks like mold is rapidly gaining importance among the GNU toolchain users because it's the only modern linker that supports all GCC features. In contrast, GNU ld is too slow for large projects, GNU gold lacks adequate maintenance, and LLVM lld does not support GCC LTO.

If mold is better than GNU ld, why can't we use it as /usr/bin/ld? In most instance, we actually can, except one major use case: kernel/embedded programming.

In this talk, I'll discuss the current status of the project, how we achieved the speed and while porting it to 15+ targets in just a few years, and our plans for supporting kernel/embedded programming.