Replacing ld with gold - any experience?

Question

Has anyone tried to use gold instead of ld?

gold promises to be much faster than ld, so it may help speeding up test cycles for large C++ applications, but can it be used as drop-in replacement for ld?

Can gcc/g++ directly call gold.?

Are there any know bugs or problems?

Although gold is part of the GNU binutils since a while, I have found almost no "success stories" or even "Howtos" in the Web.

(Update: added links to gold and blog entry explaining it)

Answer 1

You could link ld to gold (in a local binary directory if you have ld installed to avoid overwriting):

ln -s `which gold` ~/bin/ld

or

ln -s `which gold` /usr/local/bin/ld

Answer 2

At the moment it is compiling bigger projects on Ubuntu 10.04. Here you can install and integrate it easily with the binutils-gold package (if you remove that package, you get your old ld). Gcc will automatically use gold then.

Some experiences:

• gold doesn't search in /usr/local/lib
• gold doesn't asummes libs like pthread or rt, had to add them by hand
• it is faster and needs less memory (the later is important on big C++ projects with a lot of boost etc.)

What does not work: It cannot compile kernel stuff and therefore no kernel modules. Ubuntu does this automatically via DKMS if it updates proprietary drivers like fglrx. This fails with ld-gold (you have to remove gold, restart DKMS, reinstall ld-gold.