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David Lattimore
davidlattimore.github.io · Personal blog · on HN since 2023
David Lattimore, author of the Wild linker, writes about Rust performance, compilation speed, and supply chain security.
What HN saysHN commenters link it for how Wild was made fast and for Rust performance tricks, and one questions the buffer reuse workaround.
18HN people shared it
7linked it in comments
20stories submitted
363story points
5 months agolast shared
2023people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Wild performance tricks5 people · 151 points · first shared 2025 · 82 comments on HN
- 2Making Rust supply chain attacks harder with Cackle4 people · 4 points · first shared 2023 · 1 comments on HN
- 3Speeding up rustc by being lazy3 people · 7 points · first shared 2024 · 1 comments on HN
- 4Rust Dylib Rabbit Holes2 people · 63 points · first shared 2024 · 13 comments on HN
- 5Wild Linker Update – 0.6.02 people · 10 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
- 6Graph Algorithms in Rayon2 people · 5 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
- 7Designing Wild's Incremental Linking2 people · 4 points · first shared 2024 · discussion on HN
- 8Homepage2 people · first shared 2024
- 9Speeding up the Rust edit-build-run cycle1 people · 113 points · first shared 2024 · 122 comments on HN
- 10Speeding up Rust edit-build-run cycle1 people · 2 points · first shared 2024 · discussion on HN
- 11Wild Linker Update – 0.9.01 people · 2 points · first shared 2026 · discussion on HN
- 12Testing a Linker1 people · 2 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
wffurr · 2025-01-24
I went looking for some writing by the author about how he made wild fast, but couldn't find much: https://davidlattimore.github.io/
DylanSp · 2024-11-15
Looks like he's been continuing to work on it.
GitHub repo: https://github.com/davidlattimore/wild
List of his blog posts, a couple of which are about wild: https://davidlattimore.github.io/
srcreigh · 2026-01-27
Idk. Did you see the "Buffer reuse" section of this blog post? [1]
Kudos to that guy for solving the puzzle, but I really don't want to use a special trick to get the compiler to let me reuse a buffer in a for loop.
[1]: https://davidlattimore.github.io/posts/2025/09/02/rustforge-wild-perfo…
steveklabnik · 2026-01-14
> Want it fast? Turn off the runtime checks by calling unsafe code.
You can do that for sure, but you can also sometimes write your code in a different way. https://davidlattimore.github.io/posts/2025/09/02/rustforge-wild-perfo… is an interesting collection of these.
> it doesn't read like the author has spent weeks in a profiler combing over machine code to optimize Rust code
It is true that this blog post was not intended to be a comprehensive comparison of the ways in which Rust and C differ in performance. It was meant to be a higher level discussion on the nature of the question itself, using a few examples to try and draw out interesting aspects of that comparison.
pabs3 · 2025-08-20
Rust supports dynamic linking btw.
https://robert.kra.hn/posts/2022-09-09-speeding-up-incremental-rust-co… https://davidlattimore.github.io/posts/2024/08/27/rust-dylib-rabbit-ho…
film42 · 2023-10-27
I recently saw a post about Cackle [1] coming out of the rust ecosystem which looks pretty cool. Similar to what others have said, there's always a chance that a C lib or shell script is leveraged to bypass compile time guarantees. I think that's why it's important to do both. Do what you can to keep your supply chain safe and limit your runtime as much as possible.
[1] https://davidlattimore.github.io/making-supply-chain-attacks-harder.ht…
djoldman · 2023-10-13
I found this hypothetical story to explain a supply chain attack easy to understand:
https://davidlattimore.github.io/making-supply-chain-attacks-harder.ht…