Not convinced making the code hard to debug is a very useful trade-off.
What's the point of making the so smaller to begin with?
What's the point of making the so smaller to begin with?
Although, thinking about it a bit more, are we sneaking up on the “why not use a static library” zone?
99.9% of users will never touch all this, in return they get faster downloads of the browser and faster startup.
Yes, I suppose for pre release versions the calculation is different, but for a stable release there 'shouldn't' be any bugs.
You need some of that debug information to send backtraces back to the developers.
IDK on linux but on windows opening a 600mb exe (e.g. release with debug info) and a 15mb one (same but stripped) have a VERY OBVIOUS startup time difference. I assume the OS is scanning the whole binary through some antivirus for instance, and I'd assume the same to be true for DLLs used by the app, so all these kernel loading pages optimizations go through the trash.
Even Windows wouldn't do something so silly.
The obvious one is a smaller .so may have fewer pages of interest. If each function you call takes half a page, and you call 1/4th of the functions, chances are good you need to load more than 1/4the pages, because sometimes you'll call both functions in a page you load and sometimes you won't. In other words: if the .so is smaller, you get better packing.
The other explanation is prefetching. Lets say all functions take a full page, so packing into a page doesn't matter. When you call a function, which demand pages, chances are the kernel is also going to load adjacent pages; if all the functions you call are adjacent, prefetching saves you significant i/o time. Otoh, if your functions are sparse in the backing file, you will have to wait for i/o; which may be (marginally) delayed because of prefetching on earlier loads.
Users won't touch it directly, but I deem it a given that Chrome and its derivatives upload crash logs to the mothership by default, and IIRC Firefox also offers that as an opt-in. Same for Android (Firebase Crashlytics) and iOS, and I think there's also ways to hook yourself into JS frontend code to transmit uncaught exceptions to a backend server.