There is considerable cost (and pain) for developers to debug external libraries due to the fact that many libraries are distributed in two editions: one with debug information,  other without. The developer has to search and download debug files, and point the debugging environment to their location. This is often a painful and error-prone task. There is also a lot of work related to build and distribute those libraries.At same time, the world changed in ways that make the release version (ie the version without debugging information) obsolete. For instance:A modern runtime can efficiently strip debugging information, optimize on-the-fly and run the program at full speed. Examples are the JVM and JavaScript interpreters.Open-source projects, or binaries that are not published outside the company, have no reason to be obfuscated. Also, given that many modern languages now support reflection, obfuscation by stripping debug information is very limited, if effective at all.Disk space is high, disk performance (SDDs) is getting better and better, and network bandwidth is improving as well.Please note that this question is limited to libraries. I'm 100% OK about distributing applications without debugging information, which is actually extremely important in the mobile world.After a lot of trouble with .NET PDBs, and .class files without debugging information, I think we should evolve processes and tools into a world where the default is to compile and distribute libraries with full debug information, embedded in the binary (like .class files) if that's possible. After all, the only remote reason for not doing that is protecting copyrights (which doesn't apply to many scenarios).Of course, the tools that pack applications should be smart enough to search and destroy every piece of embedded debugging information before publishing for download. This is based on the fact that end-users seldom debug applications.
Should we compile and ship libraries with debug information whenever possible?
productivity;compiler;debugging;copyright;release