Certainly no intention to be negative. Not having run the numbers, I don't know if the older ones got slower over time due to more features, or the new ones are squeezing out new performance gains. I guess it's also partly that the bigger codebases scaled up so much over this period, so that there are gains to be had that weren't interesting before.
Good question, I always wonder the same thing. https://www.phoronix.com/news/Mold-Linker-2024-Performance seems to show that that the newer linkers still outperform their predecessors, even after maturing. But of course this doesn’t show the full picture.
