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Is the lld linker a replacement for ld and gold?

the linker from the LLVM lld project is currently being developed with new features added by week. Its developers promise that lld faster than ld . How does he compete compared to gold ?

Is ld replacement a replacement? With gold, there are several hoops to jump over .

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One of the LLD developers, Rui Ueyama, looks back on the progress made by LLD in 2016, see http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2016-December/107981.html .

  • "Now I'm sure this [LLD] will be a serious (and, better, in my opinion) alternative to existing GNU linkers [..].
  • "LLD can now bind most xlando x86-64 programs."
  • "The FreeBSD project, and we are trying to make LLD the default system linker for the operating system, and with the exception of a few complex programs, such as the kernel or bootloader, the linker works mostly fine." Already reached!
  • "LLD supports x86, x86-64, x32, AArch64, AMDGPU, ARM, PPC64 and MIPS32 / 64, although the completeness is changing."
  • "[T] there are already several systems that use LLD as a system with linkers such as CloudABI or Fuchsia. Chrome and Clang / LLVM themselves build options for using LLD to create them."

And, as a bonus:

  • "LLD got faster [..] At the beginning of this year, LLD took about 16 seconds to create a 1.5 GB clang (debug build) executable. Now it takes about 14.5 seconds on a single core and 8.5 seconds on 20 cores . ld.gold takes about 25 seconds and 20 seconds, respectively. [..] If you have problems with link time too long, I would recommend trying LLD. "

Spring 2017 update According to one of the developers, "LLD / ELF is now ready for production, at least for x86-64 (and probably for AArch64 and MIPS)." see http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2017-March/111083.html It also contains a brief description of how to use LLD.

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