Zig got a new ELF linker and it's fast
11 comments
·September 21, 2025squirrellous
Between mold and this, the linker space appears to be going through a renaissance.
Does anyone know if it’s reasonably easy to use elf2 as a standalone linker in a c/c++ toolchain? Or is it specially built just for Zig?
olivia-banks
Looking in the source tree, it doesn't look like it has it's own entry point. Zig is heading in the direction of a very verticall integrated compilation stack (I believe this is where most of the speed up comes from), so I'm not really sure of the utility with using it outside of the Zig world.
https://github.com/jacobly0/zig/tree/4508c2543508e04253471e1... https://github.com/jacobly0/zig/blob/4508c2543508e04253471e1...
chris_armstrong
If I recall correctly, this is one of the final pieces that allows zig to be used as a fully self-contained cross-compiling C toolchain (once its linker is enabled for more platforms / formats)
olivia-banks
I might be misunderstanding, but I don’t think that's quite accurate. As I understand it, Zig ships a Clang frontend and wraps it with precompiled sysroots. Unless they're developing an LLVM backend, I'm not sure how it could serve as a completely self-contained toolchain.
chris_armstrong
zig has a cross-compiler frontend (zig cc) which can be used as a drop-in replacement for a custom sysroot + binutils + gcc for several platforms. I've used it to build OCaml cross-compilers that only depend on zig itself (https://www.chrisarmstrong.dev/posts/ocaml-cross-compilation...).
There are other projects that have used it in a similar way too.
[1] https://actually.fyi/posts/zig-makes-rust-cross-compilation-... [2] https://jcbhmr.com/2024/07/19/zig-cc-cmake/
olivia-banks
Interesting. OCaml cross compilation scared me the one time I considered it, so it's nice to know this is an option. I will be pedantic and say it isn't a replacement for a custom sysroot/binutils/whatnot, since it really just papers over those user-facing details by shipping a prebuilt collection of sysroots and using LLD. They sorta get this for free since they need it for cross-compiling Zig code anyways.
stock_toaster
Zig does have its own native x86_64 backend for debug compilation.
olivia-banks
They're also getting an aarch64 backend soon (or has it already landed)? Really looking forward to this one for development on my Mac!
My point was that Zig uses their backends (which includes their homegrown ones), but since `zig cc` is a wrapper around Clang, it always goes through the `LLVM` path and sidesteps the Zig backend(s).
edoceo
And it fixes a bug about debug output. Seems like a bigger deal than fast.
dustbunny
Zig honestly blows my mind. I think it's clearly the best next gen language because of the build system alone.
The more I hear about Zig, the more I appreciate it. Its vertically integrated stack (with the custom linker and code-generation backends) stands out to me as a really compelling feature that enables interesting optimizations. The compiler is also much easier to interact with in a consistent way compared to C. I've been using it as an experimental backend for my language project with great results.