A new linker for GNU binutils, gold, targetting ELF, has been announced. It is apparently 5 times faster to run than the regular GNU ld. It is written in C++, and Tom Tromey praise it for its performance and its coding style.

Off course it is still pre-release and will probably need a lot of testing as well as being ported to new target architectures, as it currently only support i386 and x86_64.

And I actually need to give it a try.