Rust: Faster linking times on nightly on Linux using `rust-lld`

[NewsBot]

A new Rust blog post/announcement has been posted!

TL;DR: rustc will use rust-lld by default on x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu on nightly to significantly reduce linking times.

Some context

Linking time is often a big part of compilation time. When rustc needs to build a binary or a shared library, it will usually call the default linker installed on the system to do that (this can be changed on the command-line or by the target for which the code is compiled).

The linkers do an important job, with concerns about stability, backwards-compatibility and so on. For these and other reasons, on the most popular operating systems they usually are older programs, designed when computers only had a single core. So, they usually tend to be slow on a modern machine. For example, when building ripgrep 13 in debug mode on Linux, roughly half of the time is actually spent in the linker.

There are different linkers,...

Get the full details here: Faster linking times on nightly on Linux using `rust-lld` | Rust Blog