Dev Stack
Mold 3.0 ships its Rust rewrite as a drop-in linker
Mold 3.0 is the first release written in Rust. It needs Rust 1.95, drops Intel's oneTBB and links as fast as 2.42.1, the last C++ version.
Compilers news and analysis
Compiler and toolchain news: Rust, Go and Mojo releases, LLVM and Clang proposals, linkers, build tools like Automake, type-aware linters, and supply-chain attacks in binary tools. Each story explains the change in code terms, gives the speed or build-time figures, and says what breaks.
Coding
Zig 0.17.0 brings a split build system and fast rebuilds
Zig 0.17.0 landed on October 2 with 925 commits from 206 contributors: a reworked build system, incremental builds on x86_64 Linux, and LLVM 22.1.8.
Coding
Rust 1.100 drops host tools for 32-bit Windows targets
Rust 1.100 stops shipping the compiler for 32-bit Windows. The i686 targets keep the standard library, so cross-compiling from 64-bit Windows still works.
Coding
Rust 1.99 stabilizes C-variadic function definitions
Rust 1.99.0, out October 1, 2026, lets stable Rust define C-variadic functions like printf, moves to LLVM 23 and makes no_mangle on generics an error.
Coding
Go 1.27 simd package brings portable, emulated SIMD
Go 1.27's experimental simd package runs one vector code path on AVX-512, NEON, wasm and RISC-V, and emulates it where hardware SIMD is missing.
Coding
Mojo 1.1 starts taking outside compiler contributions
Mojo 1.1 takes outside compiler contributions a month after the Apache 2.0 release, and completes the removal of fn, alias and @parameter if.
Coding
Rust's never type, explained
Rust's never type, written !, is the type of code that never produces a value. It is stable in Rust 1.100 after ten years, and it changes type fallback.
Dev Stack
tsgolint v7 ships type-aware linting written in Go
tsgolint v7 runs typescript-eslint's type-aware rules in Go. It covers 59 of 61 rules, and the project's own two speed claims do not agree.
Dev Stack
Mold's Rust rewrite aims to be Linux's default linker
Mold links 4.9x faster than LLVM lld. Its author is rewriting it in Rust and wants distributions to install it as the default linker, /usr/bin/ld.
Dev Stack
GNU Automake 1.19 fixes a 14-year-old dist bug
GNU Automake 1.19, its first release in 15 months, fixes a 14-year-old bug that broke concurrent commands like make dist-bzip2 dist-xz.
Coding
LLVM debates building ClangIR by default
An LLVM RFC proposes compiling ClangIR into Clang by default. Nobody would use it without a flag, but some estimates put build times at more than double.
Coding
Debian Code Search drops its last cgo dependency
Michael Stapelberg replaced a 7-year-old C library with pure Go using the experimental SIMD package, and matched the C version's speed.
Coding
A tampered strip binary can backdoor all of NixOS
Researchers built Ken Thompson's trusting-trust attack out of GNU strip, not a compiler, and used it to backdoor almost every binary in a NixOS installer.
Coding
Go 1.27 adds generic methods and a faster encoding/json
Go 1.27 shipped on August 19, 2026 with generic methods, a v2 engine under encoding/json, goroutine leak profiles and post-quantum signatures.
Coding
Rust stabilizes the never type after ten years and five attempts
The never type is stable and Infallible is now an alias for it. The catch is a breaking change to type fallback that crater flagged on 3,277 crates.
Coding
Rust turns on its next-generation trait solver in nightly builds
Rust's new trait solver is now on by default in nightly - the largest compiler change since 1.0, four years in the making, with stabilization planned within months.
Coding
Mojo goes open source under Apache 2.0, contributions stay closed
Modular open-sourced the Mojo compiler and tooling under Apache 2.0 a week after shipping Mojo 1.0 - but it is not taking outside compiler contributions until late 2026.
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