Re: Which editor for C/C++ programming, and more...

[Dave Reed <dreed capital edu>]

> From: Aidan Skinner <aidan@skinner.demon.co.uk>
> 
> Cory Watson writes:
> 
>  > As for strip, someone can probably give you more info than me, but to the
>  > best of my understanding, strip removes alot of debugging information from
>  > your executables.  I'm sure theres more to it than that, but unless you
> 
> Strip basically removes all the symbols it safely can, so you there
> isn't much for your debugger to latch onto.
> 
> It can be useful when you want to distribute binarys, but doesn't
> (under linux anyway) affect the amount of RAM that your executable
> takes up because the debugging symbols _aren't_loaded_into_RAM_ to
> begin with. This may vary from OS to OS. 


Interesting, I didn't know that.  So only when you're using the
debugger are the symbols loaded?


> The only real use for strip these days IMO is when you have to
> distribute something in binary format where it has to be as small as
> possible (say, over a per-minute charge net-connection) or when you're 
> comparing compilers (in which case the only fair comparision is to use 
> the same code in each one, at maximum optimisation and no debugging
> information, and then strip the binaries before comparing for size etc).


Also, it takes up a lot of extra disk space on your disk if you're
storing all your binaries with debugging symbols.

Dave