Previously, we uncompress all compressed sections before doing anything.
That works, and that is conceptually simple, but that could results in
a waste of CPU time and memory if uncompressed sections are then
discarded or just copied to the output buffer.
In particular, if .debug_gnu_pub{names,types} are compressed and if no
-gdb-index option is given, we wasted CPU and memory because we
uncompress them into newly allocated bufers and then memcpy the buffers
to the output buffer. That temporary buffer was redundant.
This patch changes how to uncompress sections. Now, compressed sections
are uncompressed lazily. To do that, Data member of InputSectionBase
is now hidden from outside, and data() accessor automatically expands
an compressed buffer if necessary.
If no one calls data(), then writeTo() directly uncompresses
compressed data into the output buffer. That eliminates the redundant
memory allocation and redundant memcpy.
This patch significantly reduces memory consumption (20 GiB max RSS to
15 Gib) for an executable whose .debug_gnu_pub{names,types} are in total
5 GiB in an uncompressed form.
Did you intend to zero out this allocation? (the '()' after the [] will cause the array to be zero initialized, I think - which might be unnecessary if you're about to write to all the bytes anyway?)