LinuxSoftware

Coding and tramping in Aotearoa / New Zealand

Gold is the new Gnu linker from Ian Lance Taylor of Google. It is a drop in replacement for Gnu ld binutils and is reported up to five times faster.

I tried it though and didn't see such great performance, probably because our executable just isn't that big and doesn't have too many templates. Most of the time of the build is not in linking, it's in make doing its recursion and dependency management, and in GCC compiling.

Rebuilding the whole tree actually seemed slower when I built with Gold, than when I rebuilt later with Gnu ld, but I'm going to discount that result saying it was probably due to files being cached the second time round.

To relink the top level executable took 12.3s with ld vs 9.3s with gold. Not much in it, especially when a clean build takes 4-6mins.

Still Gold is something I'm going to keep in mind in case I ever do need to optimise my link times.

Ian's blog posts give very interesting insights into the world of linking too.