While the Mold linker has been very impressive for its speed the past few years compared to the linkers out of the LLVM and GNU toolchain projects, there is a new high speed linker on the scene and it’s written in Rust: meet Wild.
Wild is a new Rust-based linker in development that is led by David Lattimore. The goal of Wild is to be a very fast linker for Linux systems.
Wild aims to work out well for iterative development and ultimately wants to support incremental linking as one of the design differences to Mold, besides the choice of programming language. Lattimore explains with the Wild project:
“Mold is already very fast, however it doesn’t do incremental linking and the author has stated that they don’t intend to. Wild doesn’t do incremental linking yet, but that is the end-goal. By writing Wild in Rust, it’s hoped that the complexity of incremental linking will be achievable.”
Wild has been tested so far to work on Linux x86_64, ARM64/AArch64, and RISC-V platforms. Non-Linux support currently isn’t in place nor is link time optimization (LTO) support and other features.
Benchmarks shown by the Wild project have it outperforming LLD and in some cases outperforming Mold too, such as:
Wild is licensed under the Apache 2.0 and MIT licenses. Those wanting to try out Wild or learn more about this Rust-based linker can do so via GitHub.
