A note on the binutils BOF

[Mark Wielaard]

Hi,

On Wed, Aug 26, 2020 at 01:54:19PM -0600, Tom Tromey wrote:
> At the BOF, Nick asked if anyone uses gold as their normal linker.  I
> do!  On my personal laptop, it is approximately 2x faster when linking
> gdb.  This kind of timing is representative for my setup:
> 
> BFD	0m13.188s
> gold	0m6.635s
> 
> I've saved tons of time over the years by making this switch.  IIRC the
> difference was even more pronounced when I was working on Firefox.

As another random datapoint, on Fedora and RHEL like systems (and
probably others) you can use update-alternatives --set ld
/usr/bin/ld.gold to make gold the stadard linker. It works just fine
for my personal hacking and only noticed recently because I was
looking into the interaction between gcc/as/ld. If there are
bugs/issues in gold they seem to be hidden pretty well :)

Cheers,

Mark