In QtWebKit we use the stabs format instead of dwarf2 on older gcc versions that doesn't support dwarf4, we do this to reduce how much memory is used when linking webkit (linking with dwarf2 using the traditional gnu ld used 11 gigabytes of memory). 

After Qt switched to using the gold linker when available, this has produced counter productive results as not only do we not save any memory during linking stabs object files with gold (we could live with that though), but gold produces huge debug binaries. Where qtwebkit with stabs linked with gnu ld produces debug libraries of 800MByte, and dwarf4 linked with gold 700Mbytes, linking stabs with gold produces debug libraries over 2Gbytes in size.

If gold doesn't really support the stabs format, I would have preferred it refused to link the object files over producing libraries so brokenly huge.