Without symbols you can't get backtraces, profile the program, use function-based DTrace probes, readably disassemble it, etc. I'm not saying it's impossible t

Without symbols you can't get backtraces, profile the program, use function-based DTrace probes, readably disassemble it, etc. I'm not saying it's impossible to distribute stripped binaries, I'm just saying I don't recommend it. Compared with the debug information, I think the symbol table is much bigger bang for the buck, considering how much smaller it is. It's strange -- I can verify with -Wl,--print-gc-sections that this is indeed discarding some sections from a static glibc link, so I was wrong about that. On the other hand I can also see plenty of sections in libc.a that have more than one function in them -- not sure why this would happen if libc was indeed compiled with -ffunction-sections. I agree that separate debug files are nice, and OS X's implementation of them is especially nice, since it does a very good job of finding the right debug information for an executable.