Debug formats on Linux

[Daniel Berlin]

dewar@gnat.com (Robert Dewar) writes:

> <<Actually, this isn't true at all.
> Proper DWARF2 is much smaller than stabs.
> >>
> 
> That's really interesting, it is not what we have seen at all from any
> of the DWARF2 gcc ports we have worked with, we have seen absolutely
> HUGE increases in executable size. Perhaps these do not generate "proper"
> DWARF2 :-)

No, they have a lot of duplicate info, and there are still
optimizations we don't pull off that we should (like factoring
location lists and putting them in .debug_loc, factoring strings and
putting them in .debug_str.)
BTW, this is what -feliminate-dwarf2-dups does, is eliminate the duplicates
Of course we still get killed by the overhead of so many labels.
Once we have a linker we can actually eliminate dwarf2 in, dwarf2 will
be as small as stabs, if not smaller.

It certainly has the capability to me much smaller than stabs.
--Dan