【What is stabs?】
The name stabs comes from symbol table strings, since the debugging data were originally saved as strings in Unix’s a.out object file’s symbol table. Stabs encodes the information about a program in text strings. Initially quite simple, stabs has evolved over time into a quite complex, oc casionally cryptic and lessthanconsistent debugging format. Stabs is not standard ized nor well documented2. Sun Microsys tems has made a number of extensions to stabs. GCC has made other extensions