Using mold ("the modern linker") when linking hotspot pushes down the link time considerably; on my machine it went from ~11 seconds to ~1 second. This is especially useful for developers doing incremental rebuilds; by changing a single C++ file and recompiling it takes ~17 seconds with gold and ~7 seconds with mold. (The rest of the time is makefile overhead and compilation of the C++ file which needs to be done before linking.)

We need to investigate if this can be enabled for developer environments, or perhaps made default all over the board. Differences in the resulting product compared to gold need to be checked, and we should ideally have a way to discover at configure-time if mold is available.