Ian Lance Taylor was working on GCC and binutils long before Go ever existed. He also wrote the gold linker.

It would be interesting if most of his contributions recently have shifted to gccgo, though!

I'm personally cheering for David Malcom (dmalcolm) and his work on gccjit. He started testing that on GNU Octave's JIT, so we could replace LLVM. We haven't done that yet, but maybe this year we'll be able to!