This revolutionary new feature promises to make your life easier and your code faster than ever before. But what exactly is it? And why should you care? Let’s get cracking with the world of LLVM and find out.

First things first, LTO (Link Time Optimization). It’s a fancy way of saying that instead of optimizing your code at runtime, we can do it during linking time. This has several benefits for one, it allows us to perform more aggressive optimization passes since we have access to the entire program. But there are some downsides too LTO requires more memory and disk space, which can be a problem on smaller systems or when dealing with large codebases.

Enter ThinLTO. This new feature is designed to address those issues by performing only the necessary optimization passes during linking time. Instead of optimizing everything at once, we break it down into smaller chunks and optimize them one at a time. This not only reduces memory usage but also makes the process faster overall.

So how does ThinLTO work? Well, let’s say you have a large C++ program with multiple source files. Instead of linking everything together in one go, we can use ThinLTO to optimize each individual file separately. This is done by compiling the code using LTO and then generating an intermediate representation (IR) for each object file. These IRs are then stored on disk and used as input for subsequent optimization passes.

When it’s time to link everything together, we can use ThinLTO again to optimize the final binary. This is done by loading the previously generated IRs into memory and performing additional optimization passes on them. The result is a highly optimized binary that runs faster than ever before without sacrificing any of the benefits of LTO.

ThinLTO also has some other cool features. For example, it allows you to perform incremental linking, which means you can add new source files to your project and only optimize the changes instead of re-optimizing everything from scratch. This is especially useful for large codebases where optimization times can be a major bottleneck.

If you want to learn more about this exciting new feature, head over to the official documentation and give it a try. And if you have any questions or comments, feel free to reach out we love hearing from our fellow Linux enthusiasts!