Rust Now Prefers Using The GNU Gold Linker By Default
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.
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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