A.2.31.1 Interactions

If you use this option with –xOlevel (or its equivalent options, such as -O), you will get limited debugging information. For more information, see A.2.153 -xOlevel.

If you use this option and the optimization level is -xO4 or higher, the compiler provides best-effort symbolic information with full optimization.

When you specify this option, the +d option is specified automatically.

In previous releases, this option forced the compiler to use the incremental linker ( ild) by default instead of the linker ( ld) for link-only invocations of the compiler. That is, with -g, the compiler’s default behavior was to automatically invoke ild in place of ld whenever you used the compiler to link object files, unless you specified -G or source files on the command line. This is no longer the case. The incremental linker is no longer available.

To use the full capabilities of the Performance Analyzer, compile with the -g option. While some performance analysis features do not require -g, you must compile with -g to view annotated source, some function level information, and compiler commentary messages. See the analyzer(1) man page and “Compiling Your Program for Data Collection and Analysis” in Program Performance Analysis Tools for more information.

The commentary messages that are generated with -g describe the optimizations and transformations that the compiler made while compiling your program. Use the er_src(1) command to display the messages, which are interleaved with the source code.

Warnings

If you compile and link your program in separate steps, then including the -g option in one step and excluding it from the other step will not affect the correctness of the program, but it will affect the ability to debug the program. Any module that is not compiled with -g (or -g0), but is linked with -g (or -g0) will not be prepared properly for debugging. Note that compiling the module that contains the function main with the -g option (or the -g0 option) is usually necessary for debugging.

See also

+d,– g0,– xs, analyzer(1) man page, er_src(1) man page, ld(1) man page, Debugging a Program With dbx (for details about stabs), Program Performance Analysis Tools.