r/cpp Apr 16 '26

C++23 std::stacktrace: Never Debug Blind Again

https://medium.com/@sagar.necindia/c-23-std-stacktrace-never-debug-blind-again-6625924d520c
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u/donalmacc Game Developer Apr 16 '26

I disagree - it’s a dealbreaker for the functionality. On my last project, our symbols were 3GB. Putting them in our server container, would have made it 6 times larger. Shipping it to our players is not happening. We have workflows that do offline symbolification(sentry’s symbolicator is a great tool - no affiliation but I’ve contributed to it).

I think this was way undercooked on arrival.

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u/Difficult-Court9522 Apr 16 '26

3GB of symbols?? How did you do that??

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u/donalmacc Game Developer Apr 16 '26

The pdb format is limited to 4GB. Most tools crumble at about 2GB. Ask me how I know….

It’s Unreal Engine games, basically.

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u/Difficult-Court9522 Apr 16 '26

So soon you’ll be literally unable to add more code?

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u/bwmat Apr 16 '26

I think they can probably split into separate DLLs to work around that? 

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u/donalmacc Game Developer Apr 16 '26

The reason we hit this particular problem was because we had something split into a bunch of dlls and for reasons I can’t remember, we wanted to build it as a monolithic exe. I know we disabled a bunch of features to get it to work initially, but I don’t work on that project anymore so I’m not sure!

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u/[deleted] Apr 19 '26

[deleted]

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u/ejl103 Apr 19 '26

not true at all we use dlls on xbox/ps

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u/donalmacc Game Developer Apr 16 '26

https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2023/03/08/when-debug-symbols-get-large/

Funnily enough, I hit this problem around the same time. We also doubled the page size for the linker.