Replacing ld with gold - any experience?
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
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 assume 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.