Purpose of --enable-gold when configuring gcc

Question

When building gcc 5.1 from source, the configure script lists the following option:

--enable-gold[=ARG]     build gold [ARG={default,yes,no}]

What does this mean? Is it telling gcc to use gold as the linker if gold is installed on the box ? If so, does it expect gold to be the default linker or should I point to gold via the

--with-ld=<path/to/linker>

option?

I could not find a reference to --enable-gold in the online gcc configure docs.

Thanks!

Answer 1

GCC shares its top-level configure script with some other GNU projects, notably Binutils and GDB.

--enable-gold is an option for Binutils, which says to build the Gold linker as well as the older BFD linker. The option has absolutely no effect when building GCC.