mold 2.32.0 is a new release of the high-speed linker. It includes the following new features and bug fixes:

New features

• mold supports a feature called Identical Code Folding, or ICF. As the name suggests, ICF finds identical functions and merges them to reduce the size of an output file. This is especially effective for template-heavy C++ programs since templates tend to be instantiated to the same machine code for different types. For example, std::vector<int> is likely to be instantiated to the same code as std::vector<unsigned>. We've made an improvement to our ICF algorithm so that the --icf feature is ~50% faster than the previous version. (fa8e95a289f911c0c47409d5848c993cb50c8862)
• The -z rodynamic option is now supported for compatibility with LLVM lld. With the option, mold places the .dynamic section into a read-only segment. (9a233df7e206ca944b8d996d4030c8645587b6f0)

Bug fixes and compatibility improvements

• Previously, mold behaved differently compared to other linkers if both -z defs and --undefined=ignore-in-object-files were given (https://github.com/rui314/mold/issues/1270). Now, they override each other so that the mold's behavior is compatible with others. (8cd85aaa29093a315d2b905bdcab379ac922e73a)
• Previously, --dependency-file mistakenly recorded response files as dependencies (https://github.com/rui314/mold/issues/1258). This bug has been fixed. (4281f45f06db2dd6034bb064b263373e6fa6c862)
• There was a bug that mold corrupted debug info section contents when the --relocatable option was given (https://github.com/rui314/mold/issues/1265). This issue has been fixed. (08b0a1629df5ea04fc1f8d38b28c7a1640241ebb)
• [PPC64] The R_PPC64_TPREL16_LO_DS relocation type is supported. (a8cd2e84e0ea3e5c2bd53f5924814f1539f83623)
• [ARM64, PPC64, LoongArch] mold 2.31.0 or earlier may have failed with an assertion failure when creating a large output file (https://github.com/rui314/mold/issues/1224). This issue has been resolved. (c7c8583946dc84f5bb1278bfa1b84c87d6be80cd)

Acknowledgements

mold is an open-source project, and we accept donations via GitHub Sponsors and OpenCollective. We thank everyone who sponsors our project. In particular, we'd like to acknowledge the following organizations and people who have sponsored $32/mo or more during this release cycle:

• Cybozu, Inc.
• Signal Slot Inc.
• kraptor23
• Mercury
• G-Research-OSS
• Jinkyu Yi
• CubeSoft, Inc.
• Wei Wu
• daquexian
• Dougall Johnson
• Josh Triplett
• Foxie Solutions
• nomeaning
• Igor Matuszewski