Wild – A fast linker for Linux

It sounds like you're building from scratch. In that case, the majority of the time will be spent compiling code, not linking. The case for fast linkers is strongest when doing iterative development. i.e. when making small changes to your code then rebuilding and running the result. With a small change, there's generally very little work for the compiler to do, but linking is still done from scratch, so tends to dominate.

Yep in my case I have 11 * 450MB executables that take about 8 minutes to compile and link. But for small iterative programming cycles using the standard linker with g++, it takes about 30 seconds to link (If I remember correctly). I tried mold and shaved 25% of that time, which didn't seem worth the change overall; attempted wild a year ago but ran into issues, but will revisit at some point.

Exactly. But also even in build-from-scratch use-case when there's a multitude of binaries to be built - think 10s or 100s of (unit, integration, performance) test binaries or utilities that come along with the main release binary etc. Faster linkers giving even a modest 10% speedup per binary will quickly accumulate and will obviously scale much better.

True, I didn't think of that. However, the root cause here perhaps is fat binaries? My preferred development flow consists of many small self-contained dynamically linked libraries that executables link to. Then you only have to relink changed libraries and not executables that depend on them.

So is this your preferred flow because of slow linkers?