Hello,
I am trying to read debug symbols from a binary obtained from simple "hello world" C code. I use default gcc (Clang) on macos15, then try to install gcc-14 with hombrew
$ gcc -g program.c -o program
then run
$ dsymutil program
I got :
warning: no debug symbols in executable (-arch arm64)
I am doing something wrong here. My final objective is to be able to use my binaries in total view for debugging. Without debugging symbols, I can debug properly .
Thank you
I’m gonna divide this up into two parts:
Apple stuff
Third-party stuff
On the Apple front, Clang automatically cleans up behind itself which causes grief for dsymutil. One way to fix that is to pass in -save-temps. For example:
% cat hello.c
#include <stdio.h>
int main(int argc, char ** argv) {
fprintf(stderr, "Hello Cruel World!\n");
return 0;
}
% clang -g hello.c -save-temps -o hello
% dsymutil hello
% ls -l
total 200
-rwxr-xr-x 1 quinn staff 33672 3 Dec 15:11 hello
…
-rw-r--r--@ 1 quinn staff 116 3 Dec 15:07 hello.c
drwxr-xr-x 3 quinn staff 96 3 Dec 15:11 hello.dSYM
…
-rw-r--r-- 1 quinn staff 17074 3 Dec 15:11 hello.s
Regarding your third-party tooling, I’m not sure that dsymutil is gonna be super helpful to you. .dSYM files are a very Apple thing.
Regardless, dsymutil is looking in the .o files for DWARF symbols; if it can’t find any, it’s likely because the compiler didn’t generate debug symbols, or generated them in the wrong format, or didn’t include the debug map required to find those .o files [1]. That’s something you’ll need to escalate via the support channel for those tools.
Share and Enjoy
—
Quinn “The Eskimo!” @ Developer Technical Support @ Apple
let myEmail = "eskimo" + "1" + "@" + "apple.com"
[1] That is, the OSO symbols:
% nm -a hello | grep OSO
00000000674f220a - 00 0001 OSO /Users/quinn/Test/hello.o