Wild and Mold linkers were benchmarked with conflicting results due to different hardware, filesystem configurations, and runtime settings. Wild performs better on tmpfs with fork enabled and pre-existing output files, while Mold's ext4+delete+no-fork configuration shows different performance characteristics. The authors are investigating performance differences and planning optimizations including fallocate and hugepages.
Wild and Mold linker benchmarks show performance differences due to varied testing configurations including filesystem type (tmpfs vs ext4), output file handling (delete vs preserve), and forking behavior. Wild's recent optimizations like fallocate and hugepages will improve performance on non-tmpfs filesystems.
mold is a high-performance Unix linker rewritten in Rust that links 4.9x faster than LLVM lld and 1.9x faster than wild, created by lld's original developer. Written in Rust and in production use since 2021, mold supports multiple architectures and achieves its speed through pervasive parallelism and efficient data structures.