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 fo

Answer 1

As it took me a little while to find out how to selectively use gold (i.e. not system-wide using a symlink), I'll post the solution here. It's based on http://code.google.com/p/chromium/wiki/LinuxFasterBuilds#Linking_using_gold .

1. Make a directory where you can put a gold glue script. I am using ~/bin/gold/.

2. Put the following glue script there and name it ~/bin/gold/ld:

   #!/bin/bash
   gold "$@"
   

   Obviously, make it executable, chmod a+x ~/bin/gold/ld.

3. Change your calls to gcc to gcc -B$HOME/bin/gold which makes gcc look in the given directory for helper programs like ld and thus uses the glue script instead of the system-default ld.