GCC 10 Lands The Zstd LTO Bytecode Compression Support

As a follow-up to the story about GCC eyeing Zstd compression for its LTO data, that support has now been merged into the GCC 10 code compiler.

GCC has been making use of Zlib for the massive amount of data generated during link-time optimizations (LTO) by the compiler while now Zstd is supported by the newest mainline compiler code. Using Zstd in the tests by the GCC developers there were a little bit smaller LTO ELF files while being four to eight times faster than Zlib at compression. The decompression speed of Zstd in this use-case was comparable to Zlib.

As of this week, the Zstd support for LTO bytecode compression is now supported and will use Zstd where supported and fall-back to Zlib otherwise. This is it the first use of Zstandard compression within the GCC compiler so now is checked as an optional requirement at build time.