Rust Now Prefers Using The GNU Gold Linker By Default

Written by Michael Larabel in GNU on 30 December 2015 at 10:52 AM EST. 12 Comments
GNU
The latest win for GNU's Gold linker is with the Rust programming language.

Thanks to this latest work, Rust now tries to use the Gold linker by default over GNU ld. If available, Gold will be used to offer faster linker times compared to ld. Besides being faster, Gold tends to consume less memory too.

The Gold linker tends to be significantly faster than ld at linking ELF files. In some cases like DragonFlyBSD, the Gold linker is used by default as the linker. However, Gold has some differences to GNU ld which is why it isn't used everywhere right now -- can't be used for Linux kernel modules, the default libraries are different, etc.
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Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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