mold 2.40.1 is a maintenance release of the high-speed linker. Although there are no new features in this release, it includes a few performance improvements as below.

Performance improvements

• We've eliminated unnecessary memory zero-initialization for the --compress-debug-sections option to make debug section compression faster. With this change, mold sometimes runs faster with --compress-debug-sections than without it due to reduced file I/O. (d59c55959c6a617f0a6474902de8e21b4b290f53)
• Previously, mold used an exponential pattern-matching algorithm for glob matching, which could significantly slow down version scripts or dynamic list processing for certain glob patterns. Now, we use a linear-time algorithm that is guaranteed to run efficiently for any glob pattern. (dac20fa24373f35b5dec44e4740db85c3eb7b3dd)

Bug Fixes and Compatibility Improvements

• mold now reports an error if the output .dynsym refers to a section whose section index is ≥65280, since such a dynamic symbol is not representable in ELF. Previously, mold crashed with an assertion failure. (0d8334e5a26c34b7b2142dd6b6af2751eb9391e3)