I’ve been around long enough to have had frame pointers pretty ubiquitously, then lost them, and now starting to have them again. The dark times in the middle were painful. For the software I’ve worked on, the easy dynamic profiling using frame pointers (eg using DTrace) has given far more in performance wins than omitting them would have. (Part of my beef with the article is that while edge cases do break some samples, in practice it’s a very small fraction, and almost by definition not the important ones if you’re trying to find heavy on-CPU code paths.)

I get that some use cases may be better without frame pointers. A well-resourced team can always recompile the world, whichever the default is. It’s just that my experience is that most software is not already perfectly tuned and I’d much rather the default be more easily observable.