Gold

gold is a new linker intended as a replacement for the linker.

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

package.env
To make the change persistent across re-installations of binutils, one should pass a flag to the binutils configure script. This can be done using the EXTRA_ECONF variable in a package.env configuration.

Remerge
After setting EXTRA_ECONF, (r)emerge :

The easy way
Emerge >=sys-devel/binutils-config-3 and set default linker to gold:

The hard way (manually)
The default linker can be changed immediately by linking to  in the  directory.

Hard link:

Symbolic link: