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For large projects, the linking phase (explanation) can significantly increase incremental build times. This project is a fork of the Apple linker, ld. It is a drop-in replacement that can substantially speed things up. It all depends on your risk tolerance and how much you value the speedup in incremental build time. When linking takes more than one second, I'd cut that time in half as the estimated time with this new linker. If that difference is compelling to you, then it'd be worth trying out. Personally, I'd use it in projects with an existing link time of even 500ms (but I am an impatient tinkerer). zld is forked from the most recently open-sourced version of ld. It's used by thousands of developers across many of the largest apps in the world. Without a few optimizations around hashing, it would produce byte-for-byte the same executables as the open-source one.
Features
- A faster version of Apple's linker
- The Xcode app must be installed for zld to work
- It is only intended for debug builds, to make debugging faster
- zld is forked from the most recently open-sourced version of ld
- zld will continue to be updated with each new version of ld as it is released
- Pre-built binary
Project Samples
