Wild – A fast linker for Linux

There’s been a lot of interest in faster linkers spurred by the adoption and popularity of rust.

Even modest statically linked rust binaries can take a couple of minutes in the link stage of compilation in release mode (using mold). It’s not a rust-specific issue but an amalgam of (usually) strictly static linking, advanced link-time optimizations enabled by llvm like LTO and bolt, and a general dissatisfaction with compile times in the rust community. Rust’s (clinically) strong relationship with(read: dependency on) LLVM makes it the most popular language where LLVM link-time magic has been most heavily universally adopted; you could face these issues with C++ but it wouldn’t be chalked up to the language rather than your toolchain.

I’ve been eyeing wild for some time as I’m excited by the promise of an optimizing incremental linker, but to be frank, see zero incentive to even fiddle with it until it can actually, you know, link incrementally.

C++ can be rather faster to compile than Rust, because some compilers do have incremental compilation, and incremental linking.

Additionally, the acceptance of binary libraries across the C and C++ ecosystem, means that more often than not, you only need to care about compiling you own application, and not the world, every time you clone a repo, or switch development branch.

compiling crates in parallel is fast on a good machine. OTOH managing C++ dependencies without a standard build & packaging system is a nightmare