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Re: commitment to DWARF2 debugging information
- To: obrien at NUXI dot com
- Subject: Re: commitment to DWARF2 debugging information
- From: Jim Wilson <wilson at cygnus dot com>
- Date: Mon, 5 Jun 2000 15:31:31 -0700
- Cc: gcc at gcc dot gnu dot org
- Newsgroups: cygnus.egcs
In article <20000605143913.A72848@dragon.nuxi.com> you write:
>At the urging of one of the GDB maintainers I am seriously considering
>switching from STABS to the DWARF2 debugging format for all its
>platforms. This includes i386, Alpha, Sparc64, PPC, StrongARM, and
>IA-64.
Upside:
DWARF2 is the preferred debug info format for C++ programs.
DWARF2 is the only debug info format supported for IA-64.
Linux is using DWARF2 for Sparc64 as the default debug info format.
Cygnus recommends ELF/DWARF2 for all new ports.
Downside:
Full DWARF2 support requires a little machine dependent support. This support
has not been written for PPC yet.
The DWARF2 support does not eliminate duplicate header file debug info. The
STABS support does. This can result in large debug info size increases if you
have a program where every source file includes every header file. This is
particularly common for some C++ programming styles. I believe some work is
being done on this, but I don't know what the status is.
Jim