GitHub - wild-linker/wild: A very fast linker for Linux

6 min read Original article ↗

Wild logo - drawing of rusty chain links with vines

Wild is a linker with the goal of being very fast for iterative development.

The plan is to eventually make it incremental, however that isn't yet implemented. It is however already pretty fast even without incremental linking.

Installation

From GitHub releases

Download a tarball from the releases page. Unpack it and copy the wild binary somewhere on your path.

Cargo binstall

If you have cargo-binstall, you can install wild as follows:

cargo binstall wild-linker

Brew

brew install wild-linker/wild/wild

Build latest release from crates.io

cargo install --locked wild-linker

Build from git head

To build and install the latest, unreleased code:

cargo install --locked --bin wild --git https://github.com/wild-linker/wild.git wild-linker

Nix

To use a stable Wild from Nixpkgs:

let
 wildStdenv = pkgs.useWildLinker pkgs.stdenv;
in
pkgs.callPackage ./package { stdenv = wildStdenv; }

to use the latest unstable git revision of wild, see the nix documentation

Using as your default linker

Being a drop-in replacement, Wild can be used similarly to other linkers by being invoked by GCC or Clang. Meaning you have several options:

  • Clang's exclusive option --ld-path=wild
  • GCC 16.1+ and Clang's option -fuse-ld=wild (note that Clang requires ld.wild binary/symlink)
  • Generally supported -B <path>, where <path> is the directory containing ld that points to wild

Below are examples of integrating Wild with various build systems.

Rust (Cargo)

You can use one of the options mentioned above in ~/.cargo/config.toml:

[target.x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu]
linker = "clang"
rustflags = ["-Clink-arg=--ld-path=wild"]

Or:

[target.x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu]
# linker = "clang" # Uncomment this line if your GCC is older than version 16.
rustflags = ["-Clink-arg=-fuse-ld=wild"]

C/C++ (autotools, CMake, meson, etc.)

Usually setting LDFLAGS is enough, but there are projects that implement their own solutions:

export LDFLAGS="${LDFLAGS} -fuse-ld=wild"

Or (especially useful for older GCC versions), create a symlink ld pointing to wild and pass the directory to GCC:

ln -s /usr/bin/wild /tmp/ld

export CFLAGS="${CFLAGS} -B/tmp"
export CXXFLAGS="${CXXFLAGS} -B/tmp"
export LDFLAGS="${LDFLAGS} -B/tmp"

Then configure the project (you might need to remove the configuration cache first) and run your usual build steps.

Due to the complexity of these build systems, you might want to verify that Wild was used to link a binary with readelf.

Illumos specific Cargo configuration:

[target.x86_64-unknown-illumos]
# Absolute path to clang - on OmniOS this is likely something like /opt/ooce/bin/clang.
linker = "/usr/bin/clang"

rustflags = [
    # Will silently delegate to GNU ld or Sun ld unless the absolute path to Wild is provided.
    "-Clink-arg=-fuse-ld=/absolute/path/to/wild"
]

Using wild in CI

If you'd like to use Wild as your linker for Rust code in CI, see wild-action.

Q&A

Why another linker?

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.

What's working?

The following platforms / architectures are currently supported:

  • x86-64 on Linux
  • ARM64 on Linux
  • RISC-V (riscv64gc) on Linux
  • LoongArch64 on Linux (initial support)
  • PPC64LE on Linux (initial support)

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
  • GNU jobserver support
  • Partial linker script support. See the linker script support matrix for details.
  • Linker plugin LTO - known issues

What isn't yet supported?

Here are some of the larger things that aren't yet done, roughly sorted by current priority:

  • Incremental linking
  • More complex linker scripts
  • Mach-O support
  • Windows support

How can I verify that Wild was used to link a binary?

Install readelf (available from binutils package), then run:

readelf --string-dump .comment my-executable

Look for a line like:

Linker: Wild version 0.1.0

You can probably also get away with strings (also available from binutils package):

strings my-executable | grep 'Linker:'

Where did the name come from?

It'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.

Benchmarks

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.

All benchmarks are run with output to a tmpfs. See BENCHMARKING.md for details on running benchmarks.

We run benchmarks on a few different systems:

Here's a few highlights.

Ryzen 9955HX (16 core, 32 thread)

First, we link the Chrome web browser (or technically, Chromium).

Benchmark of linking chrome-crel

Memory consumption when linking Chromium:

Benchmark of linking chrome-crel

librustc-driver is the shared object where most of the code in the Rust compiler lives. This benchmark shows the time to link it.

Benchmark of linking librustc-driver

For something much smaller, this is the time to link Wild itself. This also shows a few different Wild versions, so you can see how the link time has been tracking over releases.

Benchmark of linking wild

Raspberry Pi 5

Here's linking rust-analyzer on a Raspberry Pi 5.

Time to link rust-analyzer-no-debug

Linking Rust code

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 test

Alternatively, with ld.wild symlink pointing at wild:

RUSTFLAGS="-Clinker=clang -Clink-args=-fuse-ld=wild" cargo test

Contributing

For more information on contributing to wild see CONTRIBUTING.md.

For a high-level overview of Wild's design, see DESIGN.md.

Chat server

We have a Zulip server for Wild-related chat. You can join here.

Further reading

Many of the posts on David's blog are about various aspects of the Wild linker.

Sponsorship

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.

Code of Conduct

The Wild project adheres to the Rust code of conduct. If you have any moderation concerns or queries, please email wild-mod@googlegroups.com.

License

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.