At the moment it is compiling bigger projects on Ubuntu 10.04. Here you can install and integrate it easily with the binutils-gold package (if you remove that package, you get your old ld). Gcc will automatically use gold then.
Some experiences:
- gold doesn’t search in
/usr/local/lib - gold doesn’t assume libs like pthread or rt, had to add them by hand
- it is faster and needs less memory (the later is important on big C++ projects with a lot of boost etc.)
What does not work: It cannot compile kernel stuff and therefore no kernel modules. Ubuntu does this automatically via DKMS if it updates proprietary drivers like fglrx. This fails with ld-gold (you have to remove gold, restart DKMS, reinstall ld-gold.