Stabs

For other uses, see Stab (disambiguation).

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 Peter Kessler [Wikidata] for the Berkeley Pascal pdx debugger,[1] however, he claims otherwise, stating stabs came with adb and sdb but could predate those.[2] Mark Linton [Wikidata], 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".[3]

  1. ^ Menapace, Julia; Kingdon, Jim; MacKenzie, David (1993). "Overview of Stabs". The "stabs" Debug Format. Cygnus Support. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.38.1857. Retrieved 2018-01-21.
  2. ^ Kessler, Peter B. (November 21, 2014). "RFR: 8065656: Use DWARF debug symbols for Solaris". build-dev (Mailing list). Retrieved 2018-01-21.
  3. ^ Linton, Mark A. (1990). "The Evolution of Dbx" (PDF). USENIX Summer. USENIX Summer 1990 Technical Conference. pp. 211–220. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.38.5985. S2CID 15074926. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2018-01-23. Retrieved 2018-01-21.