Wild Linker 0.10 Released With GDB Index Support, Mitigation For Btrfs Performance

Wild 0.10 released overnight as this very fast linker for Linux that is written in the Rust programming language and focused on iterative development.

One of the new features worth noting for Wild 0.10 is the introduction of "--gdb-index" support. The GNU Gold linker originally introduced "--gdb-index" and since found in LLD and Mold as a linker flag to tell the linker to pre-compute and embed a symbol index section directly inside the final binary. That .gdb_index symbol index section provides for much faster startup times for debuggers like GDB and lowering the overhead.

Supporting --gdb-index by Wild was a request since 2025 that is now finally in place for Wild 0.10.

For those using Wild on a Btrfs file-system (or VFAT), the linker will now default to "--no-mmap-output-file" for better performance. The release announcement notes, "the most notable change was that we now avoid using mmap on the output file if it's on a btrfs or vfat filesystem, which gives a bit of a speed-up, although you're still much better off avoiding these filesystems for your builds if at all possible." Aside from that though, Wild 0.10 is performing similar to its prior release:

Wild 0.10 also brings various bug fixes, started on 32-bit support, the WebAssembly (WASM) port can now link a range of programs, and the libwild library can use input and output files purely in memory. More details on Wild 0.10 can be found via GitHub.