LLVM LLD linker fails on Mac OS X

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1

I want to speed up my local development of a web app and I heard LLVM's LLD linker is a fast alternative to GCC's standard linker LD.

I'm on a recent rust

$ rustc --version
rustc 1.41.0-nightly (5fa0af232 2019-11-22)

and I have run brew install llvm to get the 9.0 system installed. Then I have it exposed through my $PATH and I have lld (typical old school compiler tool, it won't spit out its version info):

$ which lld
/usr/local/opt/llvm/bin/lld

So now when I try to run cargo with the magic reconfig variable I get early failures:

$ RUSTFLAGS="-C linker=ld64.lld" cargo build
   Compiling proc-macro2 v1.0.6
   Compiling log v0.4.8
   Compiling byteorder v1.3.2
   Compiling memchr v2.2.1
   Compiling arrayvec v0.4.12
error: failed to run custom build command for `log v0.4.8`

Caused by:
  process didn't exit successfully: `/Users/xlange/code/thing/target/debug/build/log-e84787c8de742ce8/build-script-build` (signal: 11, SIGSEGV: invalid memory reference)
--- stdout
cargo:rustc-cfg=atomic_cas
cargo:rerun-if-changed=build.rs

How can I get it to use the rust-lld that's installed by rustup? I see them like this:

/Users/xlange/.rustup//toolchains/nightly-x86_64-apple-darwin/bin/rust-lldb
/Users/xlange/.rustup//toolchains/nightly-x86_64-apple-darwin/lib/rustlib/x86_64-apple-darwin/bin/rust-lld
/Users/xlange/.rustup//toolchains/nightly-x86_64-apple-darwin/lib/rustlib/etc/lldb_rust_formatters.py

and I can do something like:

$ export PATH="/Users/xlange/.rustup//toolchains/nightly-x86_64-apple-darwin/lib/rustlib/x86_64-apple-darwin/bin/:$PATH"
$ RUSTFLAGS="-C linker=rust-lld" cargo build
$ RUSTFLAGS="-C linker=rust-lld" cargo build
   Compiling libc v0.2.65
   Compiling cfg-if v0.1.10
   Compiling proc-macro2 v1.0.6
   Compiling unicode-xid v0.2.0
   Compiling syn v1.0.5
   Compiling spin v0.5.2
   Compiling log v0.4.8
   Compiling byteorder v1.3.2
   Compiling either v1.5.3
   Compiling semver-parser v0.7.0
   Compiling slab v0.4.2
   Compiling autocfg v0.1.7
   Compiling memchr v2.2.1
   Compiling fnv v1.0.6
   Compiling scopeguard v1.0.0
   Compiling smallvec v0.6.10
error: linking with `rust-lld` failed: exit code: 1
[[[ SNIP ]]]
  = note: rust-lld: error: unknown argument '-dead_strip'
          rust-lld: error: /Users/xlange/code/thing/target/debug/build/log-e84787c8de742ce8/build_script_build-e84787c8de742ce8.build_script_build.b80nmw92-cgu.0.rcgu.o: unknown file type
1 Like
2

As I understand it, LLD is basically broken on MacOS.
It's one of the reasons that Rust doesn't use it by default.

5 Likes
3

Ah! I didn't find anything that called it out so clearly. Hopefully this post gets some ranking and it'll save intrepid Mac hackers some grief.

1 Like
4

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