Currently we are disabling ld.gold usage in most of the scenarios (as only a few people try to use ld.gold as default linker for ALL the system). But upstream default is ld.gold instead of bfd and, also, it should be much faster than old ld for webkit-gtk https://trac.webkit.org/wiki/WebKitGTK/SpeedUpBuild Then, maybe we should try to let it use ld.gold even when it is not set as default linker for the rest of the system :/ The part showing it is the default is in: # Use ld.gold if it is available and isn't disabled explicitly include(CMakeDependentOption) CMAKE_DEPENDENT_OPTION(USE_LD_GOLD "Use GNU gold linker" ON "NOT CXX_ACCEPTS_MFIX_CORTEX_A53_835769" OFF) if (USE_LD_GOLD) execute_process(COMMAND ${CMAKE_C_COMPILER} -fuse-ld=gold -Wl,--version ERROR_QUIET OUTPUT_VARIABLE LD_VERSION) if ("${LD_VERSION}" MATCHES "GNU gold") set(CMAKE_EXE_LINKER_FLAGS "${CMAKE_EXE_LINKER_FLAGS} -fuse-ld=gold -Wl,--disable-new-dtags") set(CMAKE_SHARED_LINKER_FLAGS "${CMAKE_EXE_LINKER_FLAGS} -fuse-ld=gold -Wl,--disable-new-dtags") else () message(WARNING "GNU gold linker isn't available, using the default system linker.") set(USE_LD_GOLD OFF) endif () endif () from Source/cmake/OptionsCommon.cmake
done in 2.12.3
