Huge Increase in Unstripped Executable Size G++ 2.95 to 3.2

Andi Kleen ak@suse.de
Fri Feb 28 10:29:00 GMT 2003


Jim Wilson <wilson@tuliptree.org> writes:

> while DWARF2 debug info is designed 
> to be more compact than stabs, 

That's a joke isn't it? Don't tell me you're serious on this. If that
was one design point of dwarf2 then it completely failed to realize
that design. Ever since gcc has switched to dwarf2 I had to change
many makefiles from -g to -gstabs to keep my source code partition
from overflowing.

E.g. on a Linux kernel compile with debugging information -gstabs vs
-g makes a about a factor 5 difference in space required. Also dwarf2
runs much slower for compilation/linking because it is entirely IO
bound just for writing the huge object and executable files.

Just explaining that huge different with duplicated include files
sounds a bit suspicious. Duplicated include files should be handled
by the preprocessor and never seen by the compiler.

That's just plain C; C++ with STL is much worse in this regard.

Unfortunately -gstabs doesn't work anymore on x86-64 :-(

-Andi




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