michaeleisel/zld

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: archived

Adoption not part of the score

1192 stars · 49 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

zld is a fork of Apple's open-source linker (ld) optimized to make the linking phase of large projects substantially faster, intended as a drop-in replacement for debug builds. It is now archived, with the author recommending lld instead.

Use cases

• speed up incremental build link times in large Xcode projects
• replace Apple's ld with a faster linker for debug builds
• reduce iOS app build times caused by slow linking
• cut link time in half for projects where linking takes over a second

When to choose

• you have a large macOS or iOS project where linking dominates incremental debug build times
• you want a drop-in replacement for Apple's ld via Xcode linker flags
• you're stuck on an older Xcode toolchain where zld still works

When to avoid

• starting a new project today - the repo is archived and lld is recommended instead
• release/production builds - it is only intended for debug builds
• you need a linker kept in sync with the latest Xcode versions

Facets

cli-tool · maturity abandoned

build-tool developer-tools developer-tools performance compilers cpp cli linker xcode debug-builds incremental-builds drop-in-replacement macos ios

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markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="michaeleisel/zld")