Agreed -- not my wheelhouse, but couldn't you just build rust earlier in your process using LLD, then build mold, then build everything else?

Would that meant that building rust is slower, but everything else is the same, and you don't have to maintain a fork of another complex project?

Because mold is faster. Linking is a significant bottleneck when building large projects.

This exists: https://github.com/thepowersgang/mrustc.

The need here is bootstrapping. If mold is written in Rust you cannot even compile it.

There are classes of virus that are hard to detect. One is a compiler virus that passes itself from compiler to compiler. You only get rid of the vector by bootstrapping from 0.

I do understand what you are trying to say, but I think that this fails to be kind to Irvick and the other maintainers of the stage0 project who are actually being quite underfunded (someone like OAI should fund them in the name of security!)

So asking them to pay money is well.. not quite the solution.

What can happen as it often happens, is this, Mold creator created the project, Stage0 found it useful, Mold ports itself to rust, Stage0 now founds it not useful, Stage0 can comment on the new update and be slightly disappointed and comment how they would've preferred to not rust in this particular case for them.

Yes this doesn't prevent mold from changing to rust or anything as it was shown but I guess we can allow the ability for Irvick to drop a comment I guess without saying that's your responsibility while they are just being maintainers of the open source and an underfunded/mostly volunteer one of work at that.

Also, @Irvick, stage0 is extremely cool, I hope that a lot more companies sponsor the work that stage0 contributors are doing. I think that it can help the supply-chain issues that the industry is facing at, and is honestly just a really cool idea and I love reading your comments and thank you!

It's simply an ordering problem. When building the entire world from scratch, usually the C and C++ toolchains are built near the very first, and Rust toolchains built somewhat later. Anything written in Rust must come after the Rust toolchain is built. You need a linker as part of your C++ toolchain, so it must be written in a language ready to go at that point. If it is written in C, you are done. If it is written in Rust you have to wait. So a Rust-based linker can no longer be used from that very, very early C bootstrap.

It's not a big deal for normal users, where you have Rust ready to go. Kind of a bummer in this case, but this is a specialized one.

One of the explicit goals for Mold 3.0 is to promote its use as the default linker in Linux distributions, and bootstrapping complexity is certainly worthy of consideration in that realm.

> We will then conduct extensive compatibility testing and work closely with Linux distribution developers to make it practical for them to adopt mold as /usr/bin/ld. Making this happen is one of our highest priorities for mold 3.x.

They were solved by mold. And then mold decided to un-solve them.