Re: ld.gold is deprecated

i used to use ld.gold because of a big issue occuring while building with the standard linker which resulted in unable to build stuff My pla was to use ldd and it failed too at the time. This wa during Debian8 times.

Under debian13 my builds failed because ld.gold is no longer there. However the standard linker shipped with Debian13 does not show this bug anymore so I changed back to it. I have not tried ldd since. It might have improved.

supporting ldd and mold would be a great idea. Mold has a few nice attributes speeding up things but I never had much time to test if build using mold works properly.

On 12 Oct 2025, at 07:26, Ethan Charoenpitaks <[email protected]> wrote:



Hello everyone,

On 2025-02-02, Nick Clifton, the maintainer of GNU binutils, announced
that ld.gold was deprecated starting in binutils 2.44:

In a change to our previous practice, in this release the

binutils-2.44.tar tarball does not contain the sources for the
gold

linker. This is because the gold linker is now deprecated and
will

eventually be removed unless volunteers step forward and offer
to

continue development and maintenance.

See also the
Phoronix article .

Currently most users who use GNUstep with Clang and libobjc2 on
GNU/Linux use ld.gold, and so do packagers.

Could we use LLD?

There are some old notes lying around (gnustep-back
packaging for FreeBSD , Wiki
page "Building GNUstep under Debian FreeBSD" (I assume this
is GNU/kFreeBSD)) that imply that LLD does not work properly with
libobjc2.

Meanwhile, our Windows and Android ports seem to use LLD, and Hugo
Melder's installation guide recommends to use LLD. So it
looks like LLD works properly with libobjc2; is this true?

Could we use Mold?

Mold is around 4 times faster than LLD, up to 18 times faster
than ld.gold, and up to 31 times faster than ld.bfd. Thus, if we
do need to make any linker changes in order to get a working
non-gold linker, it would probably be a good idea to work on mold.
Has anyone tried using GNUstep with Mold, and are there any issues
that pop up?

Thanks,

Ethan Charoenpitaks