Wild 0.11.0 Can Link Kernel Modules, and Says COMDAT Support Slowed It

Wild, the Rust linker built for fast Linux builds, shipped version 0.11.0 on Oct. 24 with linker-script support its release notes say is enough to link Linux kernel modules and nearly the kernel itself. The same notes say Wild "got a bit slower" because of a correctness fix, and give no benchmark numbers.

The release notes were published by the project's GitHub Actions bot and name no author. The README describes Wild as "a linker with the goal of being very fast for iterative development." It listed 4.1k stars and 146 forks and is licensed under Apache-2.0 or MIT.

What changed in 0.11.0

The notes list many new linker-script features, among them FILEHDR and PHDRS, ASSERT and SIZE32 and SIZE64 relocations. Linker scripts tell a linker where each section of a program goes in memory, which is why kernel builds depend on them.

WebAssembly output is now on by default, though debug info is still unsupported. Mac support is not enabled by default, but the notes say Wild can link itself there and that one maintainer uses it as the default Rust linker on a Mac.

The build requirement moved to Rust 1.99.0. Threads are now capped at 32 by default, which the notes say avoids contention on a per-inode mutex in Linux.

Target	Status in the README	0.11.0 note
Linux x86-64, AArch64, RISC-V, LoongArch64	Supported	Broader linker-script support
Linux PPC64LE	Initial support	None
WebAssembly (wasm32)	Supported	On by default
macOS (Mach-O)	Listed as future work	Not default, self-link works

The slowdown the notes admit to

The sentence worth reading is in the performance section: "We also got a bit slower due to implementing proper ELF COMDAT support." COMDAT sections let identical code emitted by several object files be folded into one copy, and getting that right matters for C++ and Rust output.

The notes also say the maintainers fixed performance issues on various filesystems and made "a few general performance improvements". They list parallelised archive parsing and hugepage use on ext4 and xfs. None of those items carries a figure, and the notes do not say how much slower COMDAT support made things.

Speed claims here are the project's own. The README links benchmark pages for a Ryzen 9 9955HX, a Raspberry Pi 5 and a Mac Mini M4, but gives no numbers in its text, and the Mac Mini page is labelled Mach-O while Mach-O support is listed as future work.

Who pays for it

The Rust Foundation announced on June 30 that Wild joined its Rust Innovation Lab, with AWS financially supporting development. David Lattimore, Wild's lead maintainer, said the support "will enable us to bring faster linking". Joel Marcey, the foundation's director of technology, said "build speed remains one of the biggest pain points developers face."

Wild's stated rival is mold. Phoronix reported on Sept. 25, 2025 that Lattimore said mold "doesn't do incremental linking and the author has stated that they don't intend to." Incremental linking, which relinks only what changed, remains on Wild's future-work list.

Other young Rust-adjacent projects have had their speed claims challenged, as with the Fyra Labs review of Tov's benchmarks and the Roc DEFLATE comparison with libdeflate. Wild's next listed milestones are incremental linking, Mach-O and Windows support, with no dates attached.