mold VS ninja

I think this is unlikely to gain traction. I say that no to discourage you, just to explain.

- The community has an instinctive distrust of closed source or a compiler from an untrusted source. If you’re familiar with the Trusting Trust attack you’ll understand why.

- Dev tools in every language ecosystem are almost always free, unless they involve some kind of hosting. People aren’t used to opening their wallets. Look the experience of the guy who built the mold linker(https://github.com/rui314/mold). Far superior to the state of art, improves incremental compiles a lot, widely applicable across ecosystems (C, C++, Rust), CPU architectures and Operating Systems. You don’t even have to modify your compiler, just need to point to his linker. He’s even giving it away for free for personal use. But still, almost no one uses it. The inertia of the established options is really high.

- It’s not complex enough. Think about the complexity involved in the cranelift backend. No one can seriously recreate the efforts of bjorn3. If we could have, we would have. But the idea idea here can be recreated, especially by the experts who already built incremental compilation into rustc.

- But if your solution is truly complex, like the parallel frontend, the burden of maintaining a fork would be too high. You’d have to spend all your time rebasing.

Again I’m not trying to discourage you, just stating the difficulties of making a business in the dev tools space. You would be better off contributing this excellent work to the community and trying a different tack.

I initially thought this would be about the mold linker (https://github.com/rui314/mold)

I assume this submission is trying to highlight the specific message (2023-01-24) : https://github.com/rui314/mold/issues/190#issuecomment-14028...

Fyi... the author wrote a more expansive blog post about selling dev tools a few months later (2023-06-06) and there was a related HN thread about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36225016

Loongson's LoongArch CPU has been supported. (03b1a1c)

I'm amazed at how quickly the author responds to requests: https://github.com/rui314/mold/issues/1057

From the report to the fix in less than two days.

I'm not sure how competitive it will be with lld, especially if we consider ThinLTO (which takes multiple minutes on 64-core machine) - it can make the advantages of mold insignificant.

What other solutions have you tried for the problem of slow linking? You haven't even said which linker and what flags you're using. I haven't actually tried it, but the author of gold has an even faster linker called mold: https://github.com/rui314/mold

> Mold did it first, though: https://github.com/rui314/mold

Before LLD?

Under the hood, Rescript uses a build system called Ninja. Ninja is similar to Make, but cross-platform and more minimal/performant.

Really? I thought most new projects were switching to ninja[^1] and have never used it.

[^1]: https://ninja-build.org/

warning: Starting with the September 2023 release, the default triplet for vcpkg libraries will change from x86-windows to the detected host triplet (x64-windows). To resolve this message, add --triplet x86-windows to keep the same behavior. Computing installation plan... The following packages will be built and installed: * egl-registry:x86-windows -> 2022-09-20 glew:x86-windows -> 2.2.0#3 * opengl:x86-windows -> 2022-12-04#3 * opengl-registry:x86-windows -> 2022-09-29#1 * vcpkg-cmake:x64-windows -> 2023-05-04 * vcpkg-cmake-config:x64-windows -> 2022-02-06#1 Additional packages (*) will be modified to complete this operation. Detecting compiler hash for triplet x86-windows... A suitable version of powershell-core was not found (required v7.2.11) Downloading portable powershell-core 7.2.11... Downloading powershell-core... https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/releases/download/v7.2.11/PowerShell-7.2.11-win-x86.zip->C:\vcpkg\downloads\PowerShell-7.2.11-win-x86.zip Downloading https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/releases/download/v7.2.11/PowerShell-7.2.11-win-x86.zip Extracting powershell-core... error: while detecting compiler information: The log file content at "C:\vcpkg\buildtrees\detect_compiler\stdout-x86-windows.log" is: -- Downloading https://github.com/ninja-build/ninja/releases/download/v1.10.2/ninja-win.zip -> ninja-win-1.10.2.zip... -- Configuring x86-windows CMake Error at scripts/cmake/vcpkg_execute_required_process.cmake:112 (message): Command failed: C:/vcpkg/downloads/tools/ninja/1.10.2-windows/ninja.exe -v Working Directory: C:/vcpkg/buildtrees/detect_compiler/x86-windows-rel/vcpkg-parallel-configure Error code: 1 See logs for more information: C:\vcpkg\buildtrees\detect_compiler\config-x86-windows-rel-CMakeCache.txt.log C:\vcpkg\buildtrees\detect_compiler\config-x86-windows-out.log

I thought I would share my custom installer script for the latest GitHub versions of CMake, Ninja, and Meson.

Now that you have your build system all generated you can go ahead and build everything. By default Meson will use Ninja as the build tool. Ninja is similar to Make but much much faster. You can also generate additional build systems but that's outside of the scope of this post.

There are also some other tools like https://ninja-build.org/ that you might prefer using instead

I got Ninja from https://github.com/ninja-build/ninja, latest release. I'm assuming this is a false positive?

Oh excellent, then better (and more portable!) tools are available:

http://pants.build

https://ninja-build.org

https://buck.build

and, if you hate yourself: https://bazel.build