Wild vs. Mold: why linker benchmarks disagree
David Lattimore reproduced Mold’s recent linker results and traced the difference from Wild’s earlier numbers to benchmark setup: whether the output file already exists, tmpfs versus ext4, and whether startup uses fork or --no-fork. Under matched conditions, the linkers are much closer than the headline comparison suggests.
The post also identifies concrete follow-up work: Wild needs the same filesystem-specific optimizations Mold uses, including preallocation and huge-page mapping. It is a useful example of how benchmark methodology can dominate systems-tool comparisons.