Install bold with Homebrew, Nix

Project links

• Homepage

Commands and aliases

• bold

Project history

The official README says bold used to be emerald, but the broader emerald driver effort was split off because of maintainer time constraints. The README positions bold as a direct competitor to LLVM lld and Apple's linker, with benchmark comparisons against Apple's rewritten linker, classic Apple ld, and lld.

Adoption history

bold is a young specialist developer tool. The input package facts show Homebrew and Nix packaging, which is the expected adoption path for an experimental linker aimed at macOS and Zig-adjacent systems developers.

How it is used

Typical usage is building with nightly Zig, then passing bold to C or C++ compilers with `-fuse-ld=bold` for clang or `-B/path/to/bold` for gcc-style toolchains.

Why package nerds care

bold is interesting to package nerds because linkers are rarely casual dependencies; packaging it means exposing an alternate toolchain component that must match platform object formats, compiler driver behavior, and system linker expectations.

Timeline

• 2026: The Codeberg repository metadata records the public bold repository creation.
• 2026: The README describes bold as the focused successor to the earlier emerald effort.

Related projects

• Related projects include Apple ld, Apple's classic ld mode, LLVM lld, Zig, and the earlier emerald project.

Sources

• https://codeberg.org/api/v1/repos/kubkon/bold
• https://codeberg.org/kubkon/bold
• input.source_facts.package-manager