What's the difference between DWARF and DWARF with dSYM file?

Question

XCode supports those 2 values for this Build Setting:

Build Settings > Build Options > Debug Information Format.

Could anybody explain the differences?

Answer 1

As always understanding the abbreviations help!

DWARF is a widely used, standardized debugging data format:

DWARF was originally designed along with Executable and Linkable Format (ELF), although it is independent of object file formats. The name is a medieval fantasy complement to "ELF" that has no official meaning. Only that both (dwarf and elf) are mythological creatures

Debug Symbol (dSYM):

By default, debug builds of an application store the debug symbols inside the compiled binary while release builds of an application store the debug symbols in a companion dSYM file to reduce the binary size.

The Debug Symbol file and application binary are tied together on a per-build-basis by the build UUID. A new UUID is generated for each build of your application and uniquely identifies that build. Even if a functionally-identical executable is rebuilt from the same source code, with the same compiler settings, it will have a different build UUID.

For example, if you have a library libfoo.dylib, the debug symbol file would be libfoo.dylib.dSYM.

_{From here}

So long story short

• DWARF is just a debug file

• DWARF with dSYM File is a debug file along with symbolification file

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Pro tip:

On our project's GitHub repo, on the releases section we have something like this:

We manually upload the .ipa and dysm file so then if 3 months from now a user has a weird crash for our 10.16 build then we'd go to this release branch and run it with this dsym and try to reproduce the issue.