On Thu, Jan 3, 2013 at 5:21 PM, David Taylor <dtay...@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