GCC Patch Enables Support For The Rust-Based Wild Linker

The Wild linker is a very speedy linker written in the Rust programming language that has become quite competitive with the likes of Mold. A patch sent out this weekend adds Wild support for use with the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC).

The patch adds support for GCC for using the Wild linker with the compiler's "--with-ld" option for specifying the linker. This patch for Wild has been successfully tested with the "vast majority" of tests passing.


Martin Liška wrote on the GCC mailing list :
"After two years of active development, would like to introduce a new linker option for GCC’s -fuse-ld flag. This linker delivers significant performance improvements—achieving speeds comparable to the Mold linker—and has reached a mature stage, successfully linking large and complex projects such as Chromium and the Rust compiler (rustc).

A few minor test-suite failures remain, primarily involving corner cases related to symbol versioning and constructor/destructor ordering, and we are actively working to resolve them. Support for the GCC linker plug-in is not yet implemented. The linker currently supports x86_64, aarch64 and riscv64gc Linux platforms."

The patch is under review while based on early comments it looks like a cleaned-up/revised version of it could be accepted soon into the GCC compiler codebase.