> The silence has been less than heartening.

Sorry, I started checking my usual reference toolchains and couldn't find
solid evidence for or against PROGBITS, then I ran out of time to look at it
so I didn't say anything.

> Some have questioned whether .stab should be loaded by default at all;
> since we already load .stabstr, which is 2x its size, loading .stab

Loading .stabstr by itself is a waste of time. Without the offset values in
the .stab section, the .stabstr data is just a meaningless pile of C strings.

If all you need is line numbers, you can get away with loading .stab but
not .stabstr; however if you need to know filenames or function names or
variable names, then you will need to load both sections.

Todd Whitesel
toddpw @ best.com