The trickiest part of this is that the binary layout code (blk,
elfshbits, and various other things) assumes a constant offset between
symbols' and sections' file locations and their virtual addresses.
Compression, of course, breaks this constant offset. But we need to
assign virtual addresses to everything before compression in order to
resolve relocations before compression. As a result, compression needs
to re-compute the "address" of the DWARF sections and symbols based on
their compressed size. Luckily, these are at the end of the file, so
this doesn't perturb any other sections or symbols. (And there is, of
course, a surprising amount of code that assumes the DWARF segment
comes last, so what's one more place?)
Relevant benchmarks:
name old time/op new time/op delta
StdCmd 10.3s ± 2% 10.8s ± 1% +5.43% (p=0.000 n=30+30)