gold linker and collect2: fatal error: cannot find 'ld'

[Pjotr Prins]

Hi all,

I am facing some issues with the gold linker. Dlang's ldc compiler
recently defaulted to gold as a linker. Ironically if I build ldc
itself with binutils-gold it does not find the ld binary. If I don't add
binutils-gold ldc builds fine but the tests fail to find the gold
linker. 

Nice one.

When I build ldc without tests (successfully) the created compiler
environment requires gold. At this point ldc won't honour the --linker
switch where you can provide an alternative (i think this is an ldc
bug - no matter because I think using gold is a great idea). Anyway,
pulling in binutils-gold compiles my software fine if you set
LD_LIBRARY_PATH to LIBRARY_PATH.  This is because the latter is not
honoured by gold.

Note that gold has a compatibility layer for ld, but it does not pick
up environment variables (on purpose).

Unfortunately the runtime of compiled software fails because the rpath is
not updated either. So that requires adding in the RPATH explicitly on
the ldc command line. When I set the RPATH the runtime is fine. 

I am posting this here so others can benefit when they run into
similar issues later. Maybe the solution is to create an ld-wrapper
style gold-wrapper for gold.

Wdyt?

Also I need to somehow resolve the ldc tests running on gold. Can we
pull in standard ld and gold at the same time? binutils-gold suggests
not.

Pj.