gold is a linker for ELF files. It became an official GNU package and was added to binutils on March, 2008 and first released in binutils version 2.19. Gold was developed by Ian Lance Taylor and a small team at Google. The motivation for writing gold was to make a linker that is faster than the GNU linker, especially for large applications coded in C++.Unlike the GNU linker, gold doesn't use the BFD library to process object files.