lld linker
Ranked 3 of 3 linkers by recommenders
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.
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.
10 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 9
- criticize it
- 1
- approval share
- 90%
Recommended in 6 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: not recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 9 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, not met.
- 9 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 6 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Fast linking of large binaries
“speeding up the link step (which dynamic linking does dramatically, especially with parallel linkers like lld)”
Comment from 23 Feb 2026 in “What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust” “now we can link multi-gigabyte binaries in a second or two”
Comment from 27 Aug 2026 in “Mold: A Massively Parallel Linker” “LLVM's lld linker is typically faster.”
Comment from 4 Nov 2025 in “Linkers (2007)” Better than the default linker
“lld-link is already a big step up from link.exe”
Comment from 10 Sep 2026 in “Rust is tier-1 language at Microsoft” “Use the lld linker instead of the default one”
Comment from 26 May 2026 in “Performance of Rust Language [pdf]”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Much slower than mold
“LLD would work fine for the whole tree, and did previously, but is much much slower than mold”
Comment from 5 Oct 2026 in “Mold Linker Version 3.0.0 Release – Rewritten in Rust” Coarse parallelism with single-threaded bottlenecks
“It has some parallelism, but it's fairly coarse and still has single-threaded bottlenecks.”
Comment from 2 Sep 2026 in “Rui Ueyama: "We are rewriting the mold linker in Rust"”
Other linkers people recommend
The two most recommended other linkers, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mold linker | 24 | 9 | 73% | 6 | — | Approved |
| Wild linker | 10 | 1 | 91% | 4 | — | Approved |
| lld linkerThis page | 9 | 1 | 90% | 6 | — | — |
What people said
All 10 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“LLD would work fine for the whole tree, and did previously, but is much much slower than mold”
“You already must have the LLVM for Rust to be buildable, so that do not add any dependency.”
“examples of exemplary software”
“lld-link is already a big step up from link.exe”
“It has some parallelism, but it's fairly coarse and still has single-threaded bottlenecks.”
“now we can link multi-gigabyte binaries in a second or two”
“LLVM probably never even saw the issue”
“Use the lld linker instead of the default one”
“speeding up the link step (which dynamic linking does dramatically, especially with parallel linkers like lld)”
“LLVM's lld linker is typically faster.”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.