Fwd: Re: ld.gold is deprecated

-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: 	Re: ld.gold is deprecated
Date: 	Mon, 13 Oct 2025 14:55:34 +0200
From: 	Hugo Melder <[email protected]>
To: 	Ethan Charoenpitaks <[email protected]>



Hey Ethan,


LLD is fully supported and the recommended linker for libobjc2. It is 
used in production on Windows and Android.


Best,

Hugo

On 12.10.25 04:42, Ethan Charoenpitaks wrote:
>
> Hello everyone,
>
> On 2025-02-02, Nick Clifton, the maintainer of GNU binutils, announced 
> that ld.gold was deprecated 
> <https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2025-02/msg00001.html> 
> 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 
> <https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNU-Gold-Linker-Deprecated>.
>
> 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 
> <https://svnweb.freebsd.org/ports?view=revision&revision=492056>, Wiki 
> page "Building GNUstep under Debian FreeBSD" 
> <https://mediawiki.gnustep.org/index.php/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 
> <https://github.com/gnustep/documentation/blob/main/guides/building-linux.md> 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
>