GCC command options for debugging – -Og and -g3

I listened to a recent CppCast episode where Balázs Török talked about game development and mentioned that C++ abstractions make the code unusable slow in debug builds, and that he is skeptical of debuggability of meta-classes as today's debuggers cannot even handle macros. I think both problems are solvable, and I would argue that GCC is already handling at least the first issue, provided the right command options are used.

Debugging optimized code

GCC can generate debug information when optimizing, so it is possible to run fully optimized code in the debugger. But this is not too useful in reality – many optimizations change the structure of the code, so it is often impossible to single-step in the resulting binary as instructions from different parts of the program are interleaved...

The GCC developers have traditionally tried to limit the damage done by the optimizers for the -O1 optimization level, but -O1 is often used for release builds too, so there is a limit to how much optimizations can be disabled without annoying too many developers – a new optimization level, -Og, were therefore introduced in GCC 4.8. The -Og optimization level enables the optimizations that do not interfere with debugging, and it may even result in a better debugging experience than when compiling without optimizations, as some optimization passes collect information useful for generating better debug information.

The difference between -O1 and -Og is that

• -Og disables some optimizations, such as if-conversion, that simplifies control flow, so the structure of the generated code is roughly the same as in the source code.
• -Og disables some passes, such as -ftree-pta and -ftree-sra, that help other optimization passes by propagating information about memory accesses throughout the functions. The effect of this is that those passes now optimize with only the information available locally within each basic block.
• -Og is less aggressive in the back end peephole optimizations, so each generated instruction is less likely to execute functionality from several statements in the source code.

How much this affects the performance depends a lot on coding style etc., but modern CPUs are great at hiding inefficiencies using branch-prediction, speculative execution, and store to load forwarding, so the difference between -Og and fully optimized code is often surprisingly small, even when using the STL.

Debug information for macros

GCC does not put information about macros in the debug information per default, but it is possible to add it by passing -g3 to the compiler. This makes GDB know of the macros and enables some macro-related commands. But the debugging experience is still not that great. I do not understand why a better support has not been implemented – possibly because inline functions should be used instead of macros...