The author of Wild linker analyzed the lag from Mold

The developer of Wild has published the results of retesting the performance of his project in comparison to the Mold linker. The study revealed the reasons why previous measurements showed an advantage of Wild, despite the significant progress of the competitor in the latest versions.

The main factor in the performance gap was the lack of operating system-specific optimizations for file system work in Wild. In particular, Mold effectively uses system calls fallocate for preallocating disk space and hugepages mechanisms for accelerating memory operations, which gives it an advantage when handling large object files.

During the analysis, it was found that Mold has significantly improved resource allocation algorithms, which allowed it to reduce linking time in complex build scenarios. The author of Wild acknowledged that the current architecture of his tool requires refinement of input-output management mechanisms to match the level of optimization achieved in Mold.

The test results show that the difference in the speed of linkers is often determined not only by algorithmic complexity but also by how effectively the tool interacts with the OS kernel. For system software developers, this means the need for deeper integration with low-level APIs to achieve maximum throughput when building large projects.