The Wild linker is a very speedy linker written in the Rust programming language that has become quite competitive with the likes of Mold. A patch sent out this weekend adds Wild support for use with the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC).
The patch adds support for GCC for using the Wild linker with the compiler’s “–with-ld” option for specifying the linker. This patch for Wild has been successfully tested with the “vast majority” of tests passing.
Martin Liška wrote on the GCC mailing list:
“After two years of active development, would like to introduce a new linker option for GCC’s -fuse-ld flag. This linker delivers significant performance improvements—achieving speeds comparable to the Mold linker—and has reached a mature stage, successfully linking large and complex projects such as Chromium and the Rust compiler (rustc).
A few minor test-suite failures remain, primarily involving corner cases related to symbol versioning and constructor/destructor ordering, and we are actively working to resolve them. Support for the GCC linker plug-in is not yet implemented. The linker currently supports x86_64, aarch64 and riscv64gc Linux platforms.”
The patch is under review while based on early comments it looks like a cleaned-up/revised version of it could be accepted soon into the GCC compiler codebase.
