# Summary
Today, Zed uses Mold on Linux, but Wild can be significantly faster.
On my machine, Wild is 14% faster at a whole-tree clean build, 20%
faster on an incremental build with a minimal change, and makes no
measurable effect on runtime performance of tests.
However, Wild's page says it's not yet ready for production, so it seems
to early to switch for production and CI builds.
This PR keeps using Mold in CI and lets developers choose in their own
config what linker to use. (The downside of this is that after landing
this change, developers will have to do some local config or it will
fall back to the default linker which may be slower.)
[Wild 0.6 is out, and their announcement has some
benchmarks](https://davidlattimore.github.io/posts/2025/09/23/wild-update-0.6.0.html).
cc @davidlattimore from Wild, just fyi
# Tasks
- [x] Measure Wild build, incremental build, and runtime performance in
different scenarios
- [x] Remove the Linux linker config from `.cargo/config.toml` in the
tree
- [x] Test rope benchmarks etc
- [x] Set the linker to Mold in CI
- [x] Add instructions to use Wild or Mold into `linux.md`
- [x] Add a script to download Wild
- [x] Measure binary size
- [x] Recommend Wild from `scripts/linux`
# Benchmarks
| | wild 0.6 (rust 1.89) | mold 2.37.1 (1.89) | lld (rust 1.90) | wild
advantage |
| -- | -- | -- | -- | -- |
| clean workspace build | 176s | 184s | 182s | 5% faster than mold |
| nextest run workspace after build | 137s | 142s | 137s | in the noise?
|
| incremental rebuild | 3.9s | 5.0s | 6.6s | 22% faster than mold |
I didn't observe any apparent significant change in runtime performance
or binary size, or in the in-tree microbenchmarks.
Release Notes:
- N/A
---------
Co-authored-by: Mateusz Mikuła <oss@mateuszmikula.dev>
Simplify docs for mac/linux/windows by consolidating the backend
dependencies (collaboration) docs into local-collaboration.md. Most
users building zed will not need to do this -- streamline them into
getting setup to build the zed client app first.
Release Notes:
- N/A
According to #23223, manually setting `RUSTFLAGS` env var overrides
settings in `.cargo/config.toml`. Since users possibly may set their own
`RUSTFLAGS` when building, this creates an avenue where builds may fail
for really strange reasons that are difficult to debug.
This PR adds notes to the troubleshooting section to avoid setting
`RUSTFLAGS`, and offers alternatives which do not conflict.
This problem most recently affected nightly CI builders since we had
been setting `RUSTFLAGS` in our workflows to enable custom things like
gles or compiling with a specific target cpu. PR #23117 caused builds to
fail unless they were compiled with `-C target-feature=+crt-static`,
which due to this issue the `RUSTFLAGS` env var we set overrode the
`config.toml` compile flags, causing our builds to fail.
Release Notes:
- N/A
Some changes just so the build docs for the different os matches each
other :)
macos:
- moved `rust wasm toolchain install` up under `rust install` (match
windows docs)
- add instructions to update rust if already installed (match windows
and linux docs)
windows:
- add `(required by a dependency)` to cmake install (match macos docs)
Release Notes:
- N/A
This fixes#13360 by adding fallback directories that are searched by
the CLI if the main executable cannot be found in the `libexec`
directory.
Release Notes:
- Added the fallback directories `lib/zed` and `lib/zed-editor` for the
main executable search in the CLI
([#13360](https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/13360)).
---------
Co-authored-by: Conrad Irwin <conrad.irwin@gmail.com>
Supersedes https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/pull/12659
Fixes https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/12588
One of Zed's core features is our collaboration software. As such, it is
important that we notify the user when their RPC protocol is out of
date, and how to update it. This PR adds a mechanism to replace the
existing auto updater with a message explaining how to update Zed for
this environment.
Release Notes:
- N/A
Fixes#12585
This changes the expectations for installed binaries on linux based on
work
that @jirutka has done for Alpine.
In particular, we now put the cli in place as `bin/zed` and the zed
binary as
`libexec/zed-editor`, and assume that packagers do the same.
cc @someone13574
Release notes:
- N/A
---------
Co-authored-by: Mikayla <mikayla@zed.dev>
ping #6687
This is the third iteration of this PR ([v2
here](https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/pull/11949)) and uses a
different approach to the first two (the process wrapper lib was a
maintainability nightmare). While the first two attempted to spawn the
necessary processes using flatpak-spawn and host-spawn from the app
inside the sandbox, this version first spawns the cli binary which then
restart's itself *outside* of the sandbox using flatpak-spawn. The
restarted cli process than can call the bundled app binary normally,
with no need for flatpak-spawn because it is already outside of the
sandbox. This is done instead of keeping the cli in the sandbox because
ipc becomes very difficult and broken when trying to do it across the
sandbox.
Gnome software (example using nightly channel and release notes
generated using the script):
<img
src="https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/assets/81528246/6391d217-0f44-4638-9569-88c46e5fc4ba"
width="600"/>
TODO in this PR:
- [x] Bundle libs.
- [x] Cleanup release note converter.
Future work:
- [ ] Auto-update dialog
- [ ] Flatpak auto-update (complete 'Auto-update dialog' first)
- [ ] Experimental
[bundle](https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/single-file-bundles.html)
releases for feedback (?).
*(?) = Maybe / Request for feedback*
Release Notes:
- N/A
---------
Co-authored-by: Marshall Bowers <elliott.codes@gmail.com>
Co-authored-by: Mikayla Maki <mikayla.c.maki@gmail.com>
This PR removes the references to initializing Git submodules as part of
building Zed.
These are no longer needed, as our only submodule was removed in #11672.
Release Notes:
- N/A
Just adding a short note about `cargo build --release` and the location
of the compiled binary. It helps a lot to streamline usage of Zed day to
day on Linux.
Release Notes:
- N/A
