Wild – A fast linker for Linux

I'm curious: what's the theory behind why this would be faster than mold in the non-incremental case? "Because Rust" is a fine explanation for a bunch of things, but doesn't explain expected performance benefits.

"Because there's low hanging concurrent fruit that Rust can help us get?" would be interesting but that's not explicitly stated or even implied.

I'm not actually sure, mostly because I'm not really familiar with the Mold codebase. One clue is that I've heard that Mold gets about a 10% speedup by using a faster allocator (mimalloc). I've tried using mimalloc with Wild and didn't get any measurable speedup. This suggests to me that Mold is probably making heavier use of the allocator than Wild is. With Wild, I've certainly tried to optimise the number of heap allocations.

But in general, I'd guess just different design decisions. As for how this might be related to Rust - I'm certain that were Wild ported from Rust to C or C++, that it would perform very similarly. However, code patterns that are fine in Rust due to the borrow checker, would be footguns in languages like C or C++, so maintaining that code could be tricky. Certainly when I've coded in C++ in the past, I've found myself coding more defensively, even at a small performance cost, whereas with Rust, I'm able to be a lot bolder because I know the compiler has got my back.

Rust is a perfectly fine language, and there's no reason you should not be able to implement fast incremental linking using Rust, so - I wish you success in doing that.

... however...

> code patterns that are fine in Rust due to the borrow checker, would be footguns in languages like C or C++,

That "dig" is probably not true. Or rather, your very conflation of C and C++ suggests that you are talking about the kind of code which would not be used in modern C++ of the past decade-or-more. While one _can_ write footguns in C++ easily, one can also very easily choose not to do so - especially when writing a new project.

Tell me you don't have rust experience without telling me you don't have rust experience.

I mean, sorry for the snark but really, there's so many of these things that it's just ridiculous to even attempt to compare. e.g. I wouln't ever use something like string_view or span unless the code is absolutely performance critical. There's a lot of defensive copying in C(++), because all the risks of losing track of pointers are just not worth it. In Rust, you can go really wild with this, there's no comparison.