Wild – A fast linker for Linux

> 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.

Can someone explain what is so special about Rust for this?

I assume that he is referring to "fearless concurrency", the idea that Rust makes it possible to write more complex concurrent programs than other languages because of the safety guarantees:

https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch16-00-concurrency.html

So the logic would go:

1. mold doesn't do incremental linking because it is too complex to do it while still being fast (concurrent).

2. Rust makes it possible to write very complex fast (concurrent) programs.

3. A new linker written in Rust can do incremental linking while still being fast (concurrent).

EDIT: I meant this originally, but comments were posted before I added it so I want to be clear that this part is new: (Any of those three could be false; I take no strong position on that. But I believe that this is the motivating logic.)

Actually a lot of the hacks that mold uses to be the fastest linker would be, ironically, harder to reproduce with rust because they’re antithetical to its approach. Eg Mold intentionally eschews used resource collection to speed up execution (it’ll be cleaned up by the os when the process exits) while rust has a strong RAII approach here that would introduce slowdowns.

I mean, that's pretty easy to do in Rust: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/mem/struct.ManuallyDrop.html

Also see various arena allocator crates, etc.