Re: stabs support in binutils, gcc, and gdb

Doug Evans
2013-01-11T17:41:46Z

On Fri, Jan 11, 2013 at 6:52 AM, David Taylor <dtaylor@emc.com> wrote:
> Doug Evans <dje@google.com> wrote:
>> So while plain dwarf may be 8-12x of stabs, progress has been made,
>> and we shouldn't base decisions on incomplete analyses.
>
> ...
>
> If I use objcopy --compress-debug-sections to compress the DWARF debug
> info (but don't use it on the STABS debug info), then the file size
> ratio is 3.4.
>
> While 3.4 is certainly better than 11.5, unless I can come up with a
> solution where the ratio is less than 2, I'm not currently planning on
> trying to convince them to switch to DWARF.

The 3.4 number is the number I was interested in.
Thanks for computing it.

There are other things that can reduce the amount of dwarf, but the
size reduction can depend on the app of course.
I'm thinking of dwz and .debug_types.
I wonder what 3.4 changes to with those applied.