How to enable Gold linker?

Question

I recall that when Gold linker was introduced to NDK, there was an instruction on how to switch to it. But now I can't find that info anywhere in the docs. So, what do I put to my Application.mk in order to use the gold linker?

I've tried this flag: APP_LDFLAGS += -fuse-ld=gold --threads

and it throws this error:

arm-linux-androideabi-g++: error: unrecognized command line option --threads'

so I suspect this is not gold I'm linking with.

Answer 1

The gold linker is the default for ARM (and x86). From the Revision 8c release notes:

Added Gold linker ld.gold for the Windows toolchain. Gold linker is also the default for ARM and X86 on all hosts. You may override it to use the ld.bfd linker by adding LOCAL_LDFLAGS += -fuse-ld=bfd to Android.mk, or by passing -fuse-ld=bfd to the g++/clang++ command line that does the linking.

It looks like your error message comes from the C++ compiler, not the linker. If the linker is being invoked via the compiler then you could try passing linker args with -Wl,--threads. Otherwise, perhaps you also have --threads specified somewhere else.