stabs support in binutils, gcc, and gdb

David Taylor
2013-01-03T16:22:16Z

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.

Thanks.

David