Size of binaries produced by GCC on SPARC/Solaris8

[Jesse]

Hi all,

I can see that the compiler is producing very large binaries (compared to
SUN's FORTE) when I include symbols (-g). When I strip them, then the size
is decreased substantially....

...well, more than substantially: I have a case where a shared library has a
size of 47 MB with symbols, and when stripped it is reduced to 1 MB !!

Generally the ratio is around 20:1

What's the problem with debug symbols ? Even using -g1 the gain in size is
negligeable: 2 to 3 %.

I guess this could be due to the way my GCC is built. I am using the binary
package from sunfreeware.

Any idea ?

Many thanks in advance,

JC.