LLVM's LLD Linker Made Incredible Progress In 2016, Much Faster & Linking More

Written by Michael Larabel in LLVM on 12 December 2016 at 04:01 PM EST. 8 Comments
LLVM
LLVM's LLD Linker continues making great strides and with the year coming to an end, developer Rui Ueyama has shared a status update as well as posting some performance benchmarks for the gains made by LLD this year.

Highlights by Rui for LLD progress in 2016 include:

- LLD can now link most x86-64 user-land programs.

- FreeBSD is working on making LLD the system default linker.

- LLD supports x86, x86-64, x32, AArch64, AMDGPU, ARM, PPC64, MIPS32, and MIPS64.

- CloudABI and Google's Fuchsia OS are among those using LLD as system linkers.

- The Clang link time performance has improved a lot. At the start of 2016 it took 1.5GB of memory and 16 seconds while now it takes 14.5 seconds or just 8.5 seconds if using a 20 core system with the threaded version. The Gold linker takes 25 seconds or 20 seconds with threading.

- Rui commented, "I believe we succeeded to maintain LLD code base clean, easy to read, and easy to add new features. It is just 20k lines of modern C++ code which is much smaller than GNU linkers."


Rui wrote in his 2016 LLD status update, "I'm pretty sure that that is going to be a serious (and better, in my opinion) alternative to the existing GNU linkers thanks to all the improvements we've made this year."
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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