@phadej, thanks for your PR! By analyzing the history of the files in this pull request, we identified @ezyang, @23Skidoo and @tibbe to be potential reviewers.

Anyone have idea what's happening

/usr/bin/ld: --hash-size=31: unknown option

?

GHC checks ld and passes --hash-size=32 to it if it has GNU ld in its version info.
(Cf. ghc/ghc@71a194d#diff-183a20ee6313d2c3600ef96e732176a3R660). gold is not passed any additional options.

I have no idea what that means to this case though.

@alexbiehl, ok so it's expected that gold doesn't work with GHC pre 7.8.x. Thanks

It seems that the test isn't that much faster with gold, @nh2 do you have any ideas why so? Is it related to #4439 ?

We should verify that gold is actually being used for the tests. But perhaps the issue is that gold shines when linking large projects, and the test suite is basically always doing very small things.

-pgml shouldn't play a role here, since we don't use it in the script.

I think I'll merge this, because it's a small change, but feel free to revert if you disagree.