On Saturday, 15 March 2025 07:10:58 Pacific Daylight Time Henning Meyer via
Std-Proposals wrote:
> For example, in the case of ELF binaries with DWARF debug information,
> you would want the compiler to emit unoptimized, non-inlined functions
> for begin(), end(), size(), probably to_string() as well. These could go
> into a new, separate .debug_text section that can be stripped from
> binaries. This requires cooperation from libraries ([[debug]]
> annotations), compiler, linker and debugger. I am working on a prototype
> implementation.

The problem you'll find are not the ELF sections, but ELF segments. You'll need
a PT_LOAD command to load the segments and you'll need to be able to strip
those PT_LOAD segments. That means they must be at the end of the image... but
they can't be because the image extends past the end of the last PT_LOAD to
fill in the .bss section. You'd need to have actual zero pages (which you may
then strip).

A simpler solution would be to emit *another* library with those functions.
The link to it can be in the debug information, so no changes to the ELF
header would be required. That in turn would make this solution immediately
functional for all file formats, provided the debugger can cause libraries to
be loaded into memory. Moreover, unstripped libraries would remain as they
are, with no changes to buildsystems to accommodate.

-- 
Thiago Macieira - thiago (AT) macieira.info - thiago (AT) kde.org
  Principal Engineer - Intel DCAI Platform & System Engineering