shameless plug: lld 23.x is significantly faster than 22.x! I wrote about the optimizations in https://maskray.me/blog/2026-04-12-recent-lld-elf-performanc... As a side note, parallel input file parsing and symbol resolution aren't a silver bullet. I have an experimental branch (net ~800 lines of code) adding this to lld/ELF, but it actually loses performance when restricted to --threads={1,2}

I read how mold implements parallel input file parsing a while ago. It is overly complicated. wild's model seems superior.

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"Table 4." in the paper feels misleading to me. I have never measured such high speedups. In addition, on debug builds (especially --gdb-index builds), mold's edge over lld is smaller.

On ICF, some unknown fraction of mold's speedup is due to "doesn't do the symbol bootkeeping". The symbol tables are different in mold but identical in lld.