Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1007541/

Version 2.44 of the GNU Binutils package has been released. Perhaps the
most significant change is the absence of the “gold” linker, which is
deprecated and about to disappear entirely. Gold appeared in 2008 with some fanfare as a faster
linker, but it has suffered from a lack of maintenance in recent years.
This release also includes some architecture-specific assembler
improvements, and some (non-gold) linker enhancements.