Compile for debugging and performance analysis.
Produce additional symbol table information for debugging with dbx(1) debugging utility and for performance analysis with the Performance Analyzer.
Although some debugging is possible without specifying -g, the full capabilities of dbx and debugger are only available to those compilation units compiled with -g.
Some capabilities of other options specified along with -g may be limited. See the dbx documentation for details.
To use the full capabilities of the Performance Analyzer, compile with -g. 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 the manual Solaris Studio Performance Analyzer.)
The commentary messages generated with -g describe the optimizations and transformations the compiler made while compiling your program. The messages, interleaved with the source code, can be displayed by the er_src(1) command.
Note that commentary messages only appear if the compiler actually performed any optimizations. You are more likely to see commentary messages when you request high optimization levels, such as with -xO4, or -fast.
-g is implemented as a macro that expands to various other, more primitive, options. See -xdebuginfo for the details of the expansions.
Produce standard debugging information.
Do not produce any debugging information. This is the default.
Produce file and line number as well as simple parameter information that is considered crucial during post-mortem debugging.
Same as -g.
Produce additional debugging information, which currently consists only of macro definition information. This added information can result in an increase in the size of the debug information in the resulting .o and executable when compared to using only -g.