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

[Jim Wilson]

On Fri, 2003-02-28 at 10:37, Andi Kleen wrote:
> Only the linker could do it.

Yes, the linker does it.  We have linker optimizations to reduce the
size of stabs, this is on by default.  We don't have this for DWARF2
yet.  This is a work in progress.

There are also other issues.  There is certainly room for improvement in
our DWARF2 support if you would like to help improve it.

On a completely different tack, another way to reduce the impact of
debug info is to not put it in the final executable, and modify the
debugger to read debug info from the object files.  Sun has done this
for a long time with stabs.  There is some work at Red Hat being done to
try do the same thing for DWARF2.  This makes linking faster, and gives
smaller executables with no debug info at all, but makes debugging a bit
slower.

Jim