# lld linker

9 Hacker News commenters recommended lld linker and 1 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 6 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** A fast drop-in replacement for default linkers, especially on large binaries. Critics say it is much slower than mold and has single-threaded bottlenecks.

## Why people recommend it

- Fast linking of large binaries (3 comments): "speeding up the link step (which dynamic linking does dramatically, especially with parallel linkers like lld)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47126762)) "now we can link multi-gigabyte binaries in a second or two" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49464920)) "LLVM's lld linker is typically faster." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45807387))
- Better than the default linker (2 comments): "lld-link is already a big step up from link.exe" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49644879)) "Use the lld linker instead of the default one" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48277556))

## What people warn about

- Much slower than mold (1 comments): "LLD would work fine for the whole tree, and did previously, but is much much slower than mold" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49969363))
- Coarse parallelism with single-threaded bottlenecks (1 comments): "It has some parallelism, but it's fairly coarse and still has single-threaded bottlenecks." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49539080))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Mold linker](https://hackerapproved.com/p/mold-linker.md): 24 recommend
- [Wild linker](https://hackerapproved.com/p/wild-linker.md): 10 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "lld linker", https://hackerapproved.com/p/lld-linker/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).