Following the news from this summer of Zstd compression being eyed for use within LLVM , the code has begun being merged to allow for Zstd-compressed ELF debug sections as an alternative to the long-used Zlib.

ELFCOMPRESS_ZSTD was recently proposed -- and then successfully added -- to the System V ABI specification. With that toolchain developers have now been working on adding Zstd compression for ELF debug sections to provide better compression in terms of compression/decompression speed and the compression ratio.

As of Friday the work has begun to be merged into LLVM with --compress-debug-sections=zstd support and support for ELFCOMPRESS_ZSTD input .

This blog post by developer Fangrui Song "MaskRay" who has been working on some of these LLVM patches has detailed more of the effort invested this year into ELFCOMPRESS_ZSTD as a superior alternative to Zlib for ELF debug sections.