stabs support in binutils, gcc, and gdb

[David Edelsohn]

On Thu, Jan 3, 2013 at 4:53 PM, Jonas Maebe <jonas.maebe@elis.ugent.be> wrote:
>
> On 03 Jan 2013, at 21:53, David Edelsohn wrote:
>
>> AIX still uses STABS.  GCC produces it and GDB consumes it.
>
> More precisely, AIX uses Stabx. It's similar to Stabs, but different in quite a few ways. To add to the confusion, GCC produces and GDB consumes a hybrid of Stabs and Stabx on AIX for some reason (xlc and the native dbx produce/consume pure Stabx, which is not understood by GDB; conversely, dbx does not understand the GCC/GDB Stabx-Stabs hybrid).

That description is not entirely correct.

GDB understands XLC stabs debugging information and GCC can be
instructed to emit the subset of stabs information that AIX dbx can
consume.

- David