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Comment by forrestthewoods | Hacker News Reader

Strong agree.

At least on Windows you can setup Symbol Server + Source Indexing to achieve the same result.

Once upon a time I wrote a small tool that can embed full source code into PDBs. I doubt anyone has ever used it though. For proprietary software it's not uncommon to leak PDBs on accident at some point. It could be disastrous to also leak full source code!

https://www.forrestthewoods.com/blog/embedding-source-code-i...

It's relatively easy to add source indexing to PDBs. I've successfully done that for a non-standard Monorepo. Works great.

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There's `debuginfod` on Linux: https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2019/10/14/introducing-de...

It builds a lot on quite a simple conceptual base, benefiting from native support in gcc / clang (for embedding unique build IDs) and in GDB (for contacting the server). It can serve up both source and symbol information.

I would like to see this adopted more - e.g. build infrastructure automatically populating a debuginfod server so debugging is seamless.

Interesting... I've been lamenting the absence of .pdbs on Linux. It sounds like this would allow dissasociating symbol info from the build artifact itself?

(There's no other out-of-the-box solution to this right? i.e. having symbol info live somewhere else other than the .so/exe, that can be loaded on demand when debugging? Like .pdbs basically.)

GDB is happy to deal with separate debug info files from the executable code - and has been approximately "always", as far as I'm aware. But it's not particularly common / well-understood how to actually achieve it.

Some info here on how to configure GDB to use it: https://sourceware.org/gdb/current/onlinedocs/gdb.html/Separ...

The old-school way appears to be to extract the debug information from the binaries after compilation, then strip the binaries. As described here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/866721/how-to-generate-g...

The new way is to use gcc's ability to generate split DWARF directly: https://interrupt.memfault.com/blog/dealing-with-large-symbo...

This will work with debuginfod but you don't have to have that running to use these - you can just supply the symbol directory when you want to debug.

I don’t know why this isn’t more popular. Seems like PDB symbol server is more popular. At least in my circles.

There is SourceLink where you can get the mapping into the pdb files:

https://github.com/dotnet/sourcelink

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