Re: stabs support in binutils, gcc, and gdb

[Doug Evans <dje at google dot com>]

On Fri, Jan 11, 2013 at 6:55 PM, Cary Coutant <ccoutant@google.com> wrote:
>>> 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.
>
> It's not really fair to compare compressed DWARF with uncompressed stabs, is it?

Data is data.
Plus I doubt anyone is going to go to the trouble of compressing stabs.

Not that I think it's a priori worth the effort to dig deeper, but for
another datapoint, Redhat added an lza-compressed mini-dwarf-debug
section.  I'm not sure what it supports (if anything beyond making
backtraces better).