It became an official GNU package and was added to binutils in March 2008[1][2] and first released in binutils version 2.19. gold was developed by Ian Lance Taylor and a small team at Google.

Unlike the GNU linker, gold does not use the BFD library to process object files.

While this limits the object file formats it can process to ELF only, it is also claimed to result in a cleaner and faster implementation without an additional abstraction layer.

[4] This rewrite also fixes some bugs in old ld that break ELF files in various minor ways.

On 2025-02-02 the 2.44 version of GNU Binutils removed gold from the default source distribution and into a separate package, stating that "the gold linker is now deprecated and will eventually be removed unless volunteers step forward and offer to continue development and maintenance".