lld is a drop-in replacement for system linkers that supports ELF (Unix), COFF (Windows) and Mach-O (macOS) in descending order of completeness. We made a significant progress over the last few years in particular for ELF, and our linker is now considered a real alternative to GNU linkers as most compatibility issues has been resolved. Some large systems, including FreeBSD, are switching from GNU ld to lld.
lld is usually 10x faster than GNU bfd linker for linking large programs. Even compared to high-performance GNU gold linker, it is still more than 2x faster, yet it is massively simpler than that (26K LOC vs 164K LOC). Because of its simple design, it is easy to add a new feature, port it to a new architecture, or even port it to a new file format such as the WebAssembly object file. In this talk, I'll describe the status of the project and the internal architecture that makes lld that fast and simple.
