On Thu, Jan 3, 2013 at 9:52 AM, nick clifton <ni...@redhat.com> wrote: >> 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. > > > Have you tried using a DWARF compression tool like dwz ? > > http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2012-04/msg00686.html > > Or maybe the --compress-debug-sections option to objcopy ?
Yeah, that would be really useful data to have. Plus, there's also -gdwarf-4 -fdebug-types-section. So while plain dwarf may be 8-12x of stabs, progress has been made, and we shouldn't base decisions on incomplete analyses. If we had data to refute (or substantiate) claims that dwarf was *still* X% larger than stabs and people were still avoiding dwarf because of it, that would be really useful.
