Gold

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Warning
gold is less active than it once was, e.g. gold's commit history vs bfd's commit history. Users seeking an alternative linker may be interested in LLVM's lld.

GNU gold is a linker intended as a replacement for the ld.bfd linker.

The two installed linkers are available directly as ld.bfd and ld.gold respectively. Additionally, the default linker is also installed as ld - and this binary is used by compilers.

Installation

Gold can be enabled by setting the gold USE flag for sys-devel/binutils. Additionally, setting default-gold will make ld.gold the default linker.

FILE /etc/portage/package.use/gold

# enable gold and set it as default
sys-devel/binutils      gold default-gold

After setting the USE flags, re-install binutils:

root #emerge --ask --changed-use --deep --oneshot --verbose sys-devel/binutils

See also

• Mold — a linker that aims to provide drop-in compatibility with existing Unix linkers.