Wild is a linker with the goal of being very fast for iterative development.
It's still very much a work-in-progress and definitely shouldn't be used for linking any production binaries.
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.
The following platforms / architectures are currently supported:
- x86-64 on Linux
The following is working with the caveat that there may be bugs:
- Output to statically linked, non-relocatable binaries
- Output to statically linked, position-independent binaries (static-PIE)
- Output to dynamically linked binaries
- Output to shared objects (.so files)
- Rust proc-macros, when linked with Wild work
- Most of the top downloaded crates on crates.io have been tested with Wild and pass their tests
- Debug info
Lots of stuff. Here are some of the larger things that aren't yet done, roughly sorted by current priority:
- Incremental linking
- Support for architectures other than x86-64
- Support for a wider range of linker flags
- Linker scripts
- Mac support
- Windows support
- LTO
Install readelf, then run:
readelf -p .comment my-executableLook for a line like:
Linker: Wild version 0.1.0
Or if you don't want to install readelf, you can probably get away with:
strings my-executable | grep LinkerIt's somewhat of a tradition for linkers to end with the letters "ld". e.g. "GNU ld, "gold", "lld", "mold". Since the end-goal is for the linker to be incremental, an "I" is added. Let's say the "W" stands for "Wild", since recursive acronyms are popular in open-source projects.
The goal of Wild is to eventually be very fast via incremental linking. However, we also want to be as fast as we can be for non-incremental linking and for the initial link when incremental linking is enabled.
These benchmark were run on David Lattimore's laptop (2020 model System76 Lemur pro), which has 4 cores (8 threads) and 42 GB of RAM.
The following times are for linking rustc-driver, which is a shared object that contains most of the
code of the Rust compiler. Linking was done with with --strip-debug and --build-id=none.
| Linker | Time (ms) | ± Standard deviation (ms) |
|---|---|---|
| GNU ld (2.38) | 20774 | 855 |
| gold (2.38) | 6796 | 58 |
| lld (18.1.8) | 1601 | 24 |
| mold (2.34.1) | 946 | 17 |
| wild (2024-11-30) | 486 | 19 |
The following times are for linking the C compiler, clang without debug info.
| Linker | Time (ms) | ± Standard deviation (ms) |
|---|---|---|
| GNU ld (2.38) | 8784 | 42 |
| gold (2.38) | 2528 | 37 |
| lld (18.1.8) | 1679 | 23 |
| mold (2.34.1) | 429 | 2 |
| wild (2024-11-30) | 244 | 6 |
Next, let's add debug info (remove --strip-debug). First rustc-driver:
| Linker | Time (ms) | ± Standard deviation (ms) |
|---|---|---|
| GNU ld (2.38) | 23224 | 1030 |
| gold (2.38) | 8840 | 879 |
| lld (18.1.8) | 2741 | 1403 |
| mold (2.34.1) | 3514 | 2102 |
| wild (2024-11-30) | 3158 | 1616 |
Now clang with debug info:
| Linker | Time (ms) | ± Standard deviation (ms) |
|---|---|---|
| GNU ld (2.38) | 139985 | 9871 |
| gold (2.38) | 92147 | 7287 |
| lld (18.1.8) | 30549 | 9819 |
| mold (2.34.1) | 16933 | 5359 |
| wild (2024-11-30) | 31540 | 7133 |
So Wild performs pretty well without debug info, but with debug info, it's performing less well at the moment.
See BENCHMARKING.md for more details on benchmarking.
The following is a cargo test command-line that can be used to build and test a crate using Wild.
This has been run successfully on a few popular crates (e.g. ripgrep, serde, tokio, rand, bitflags).
It assumes that the "wild" binary is on your path. It also depends on the Clang compiler being
installed, since GCC doesn't allow using an arbitrary linker.
RUSTFLAGS="-Clinker=clang -Clink-args=--ld-path=wild" cargo testFor more information on contributing to wild see CONTRIBUTING.md
If you'd like to sponsor this work, that would be very much appreciated. The more sponsorship I get the longer I can continue to work on this project full time.
Licensed under either of Apache License, Version 2.0 or MIT license at your option.
Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in Wild by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.