[badsectoracula]

> It takes less time to rebuild my whole toolchain from scratch on Linux (~15 minutes) than it takes to MSVC to download those friggin debug symbols it seems to require whenever I have to debug something

Fun fact: you can do the same in gdb and some distributions (e.g. openSUSE) have it enabled by default. Though you also get the source code too.

I was messing around with DRM/KMS the other day and had some weird issue with an error code, so i placed a breakpoint right before the call - gdb downloaded libdrm and libgbm source code (as well as some other stuff) and let me trace the call right into their code, which was super useful to figure out what was going on (and find a tiny bug in libgbm, which i patched and reported).

[aseipp]

Yes, it's a relatively recent innovation, but it's pretty awesome. Symbol server has always been one of the things I actually liked about Windows development, which didn't require installing debug packages for every DLL before the bugs happen and you catch them. https://sourceware.org/elfutils/Debuginfod.html

NixOS has had a similar thing for a while called "DwarfFS" where a FUSE filesystem instead resolves filenames back to the package that needs to be installed, which was around for a while before debuginfod, but very NixOS specific. I'm happy this is now so much more widely available as of recently.