Welcoming Wild to the Rust Innovation Lab
The Rust Innovation Lab (RIL), housed under the Rust Foundation, is pleased to announce the arrival of its newest board-approved project, Wild: a very fast linker for Linux, with other operating systems to follow! Wild’s primary goal is fast iteration speed during development; one part of the solution to a common complaint about slow Rust build times.
About the Rust Innovation Lab (RIL)
The Rust Innovation Lab is a home for Rust projects that fill gaps in the ecosystem or demonstrate what Rust can achieve, with the Rust Foundation acting as fiscal sponsor. Projects get the structure, stewardship, and administrative backing they need to grow from ambitious ideas into lasting open source initiatives. Learn more here.
About Wild
Linkers have traditionally been written in C and C++. Wild brings that work into Rust, where the codebase tends to be far more approachable. That accessibility is itself part of the point: a robust, fast linker written in Rust lowers the barrier to experimentation, opening the door to innovation in a part of the toolchain that rarely sees it.
The immediate payoff is speed. Linking is often the slowest step in the edit-compile-run loop, and Wild is built to make that step nearly disappear. Faster links mean faster iteration, which is one of the most direct levers available for improving the day-to-day experience of building Rust software.
Wild is Linux-only today, but cross-platform support is a clear priority: ports to Windows and macOS are on the roadmap. The project is licensed under MIT and Apache 2.0 (the same dual license used by the Rust project itself), so the code remains freely available to everyone.
Wild is maintained by David Lattimore (lead maintainer) along with a growing group of contributors. Development is supported financially by AWS.
“Becoming part of the Rust Innovation Lab, with support from AWS, will enable us to bring faster linking to more Rust developers and to continue innovating in the linker space.”
– David Lattimore, Wild Lead Maintainer
“The Rust Project’s most recent Compiler Performance Survey made it clear that build speed remains one of the biggest pain points developers face, and the linker sits right in the middle of it. Wild takes that problem on directly, in Rust, in a way that invites the whole community to contribute. It’s a natural fit for the Rust Innovation Lab, and we’re thrilled to welcome it.”
– Joel Marcey, Director of Technology, the Rust Foundation
The Rust Foundation is excited to welcome Wild into the RIL!
Explore the project, try it out, and contribute on GitHub: https://github.com/wild-linker/wild
Join the conversation on Zulip: https://wild.zulipchat.com/
