this post was submitted on 24 May 2026
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Programming

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wild v0.9 released (wild is a super-fast linker with the end goal of supporting incremental linking) (github.com)
submitted 3 days ago by BB_C@programming.dev to c/programming@programming.dev
7 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

A lot of work in this release was related to porting to other platforms. We did a large number of refactorings to put ELF-specific behaviour behind traits. We've also started work on porting to Mach-O and WebAssembly. These aren't yet ready for use, but if you'd like to help out with porting, get in touch.

Wild now supports the linker plugin API that was originally part of the Gold linker, but which is also supported by GNU ld and Mold. This lets us do linker-plugin LTO (link time optimisation). There are still a few known issues, but it's already working on a good range of programs. Pure Rust projects generally don't use linker plugins, since Rust can do LTO within the compiler, so this is mostly helpful for C, C++ or mixed language projects. Note that when using a linker plugin, link times will be very slow.

Lots more linker-script features were implemented during this release.

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[–] bitfucker@programming.dev 1 points 2 days ago (2 children)

What advantage does this have compared to mold?

[–] Flipper@feddit.org 2 points 2 days ago (2 children)

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.

[–] FizzyOrange@programming.dev 1 points 2 days ago

Also I believe Mold only supports ELF.

And based on the benchmarks they've posted, Wild is even faster than Mold.

[–] bitfucker@programming.dev 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Honestly, op should've also put that on the excerpt. Thanks!

[–] BB_C@programming.dev 1 points 2 days ago

It's on the title, you don't even need to read the excerpt👆.

But more seriously, the excerpt is from the release/tag notes, but what's quoted above is from the README.

[–] BB_C@programming.dev 0 points 2 days ago

While eventually implementing incremental linking was the inspiration, as already pointed out. It's actually already faster than mold (see benchmarks).