stabs (sometimes written STABS) is a
debugging data format for storing information about computer programs for use by symbolic and source-level
debuggers. (The information is stored in
symbol table strings; hence the name "stabs".)
Cygnus Support attributes the invention of stabs to for the Berkeley Pascal pdx debugger, however, he claims otherwise, stating stabs came with
adb and
sdb but could predate those. , who created pdx for his 1981 master's thesis and later developed it into
dbx, states his doctoral adviser Michael L. Powell "contributed to the stabstrings design, especially
to support Modula-2".
History
When stabs was created in the 1980s, the dominant
object file format was
a.out
a.out is a file format used in older versions of Unix-like computer operating systems for executables, object code, and, in later systems, shared libraries. This is an abbreviated form of "assembler output", the filename of the output of Ken Th ...
, which (unlike more recent formats such as
ELF) makes no provision for storing debugging information. Stabs works around this problem by encoding the information using special entries in the
symbol table.
At one stage stabs was widely used on
Unix systems, but the newer
DWARF format has largely supplanted it.
References
External links
STABS GNU Debugger project documentation
Debugging data formats
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