The GNU linker ld is meant to cover a broad range of situations, and to be as compatible as possible with other linkers. As a result, you have many choices to control its behavior.

Why is linker called LD?

Linking the Object code File

...Linux comes with its own linker, called ld. (The name is actually short for "load", and "loader" was what linkers were originally called, in the First Age of Unix, back in the 1970s.)

What is LD in compiler?

Usually the meaning of these abbreviations is the following: CC stands for "C compiler" (in GCC abbreviation it is also treated as "compiler collection"). LD is a linker (comes from "link editor" or from "loader").