Re: stabs support in binutils, gcc, and gdb

[Richard Biener <richard.guenther@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Jan 3, 2013 at 5:21 PM, David Taylor <dtaylor@emc.com> wrote:
> What is the status of STABS support?
>
> I know that there is considerably more activity around DWARF than STABS.
> It appears that STABS is largely in maintenance mode.  Are there any
> plans to deprecate STABS support?  If STABS enhancements were made and
> posted would they be frowned upon?  Or would they be reviewed for
> possible inclusion in a future release?
>
> [We have copyright assignments in place for past and future changes to
> BINUTILS, GCC, and GDB -- and it took almost 4 years from start to
> finish -- I do not want to ever have to go through that again with the
> company lawyers!  So, paperwork should not be an issue.]
>
> I know that DWARF is more expressive than STABS.  And if it didn't cause
> such an explosion in disk space usage, we would probably have switched
> from STABS to DWARF years ago.
>
> Switching to DWARF causes our build products directory (which contains
> *NONE* of the intermediate files) to swell from 1.2 GB to 11.5 GB.
> Ouch!  The DWARF ELF files are 8-12 times the size of the STABS ELF
> files.
>
> If the DWARF files were, say, a factor of 2 the size of the STABS files,
> I could probably sell people on switching to DWARF; but, a factor of 8
> to 12 is too much.

The idea was to have a working DWARF -> STABS translator, eventually
as part of binutils.

Richard.

> Thanks.
>
> David