Separating debug symbols from executables | Hacker News Reader

Separating debug symbols from executables

tweag.io

52 pointsyorwba10 comments

This article will focus on ELF files on Linux. For other formats and platforms, things are likely to be quite different.

Indeed they are. It's interesting to contrast the cultural background for these decisions; on Windows, and DOS before that, debug symbols were always separate files. Personally I prefer that, both from the perspective of reducing unwanted bloat (I bet 99% or more of users who use the executable will never need nor want the debug symbols) and better privacy defaults --- it won't disclose unnecessary information about the source.

You could embed names, function argument names and locals in an executable as well on Windows until ... probably VS2003 or so. Here's the documentation for it in VS 6.0: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/visualst...

/Z7 and /Zd result in an exe/dll with no seperate pdb. You could however split it into exe/dll + .dbg.

In .NET we actually went back to an embedded symbol format, which has several advantages. However, the symbol format is more compact than the classic PDBs though.

This combined with Debuginfod(1) will improve debugging experience greatly.

[1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Debuginfod

And since this is Tweag, it only makes sense to mention https://github.com/symphorien/nixseparatedebuginfod

I apologize for the moderately OT help request, but as Tweag has some great nix / rust content, and this is about debugging, I thought some HNers with relevant interests might swing by -- I am going nuts trying to get debugging working for nix-compiled rust on an M1 Mac (via llvm). My posts to the nix forum, rust forum, and my nixpkgs repo have gone without response, and I'm a humble hobbyist that is running out of ideas. If anyone has any ideas or suggestions, please take a look at https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/262131 -- TIA, and I apologize again if this detracts from the OP!

dSYM bundles have entered the chat

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