| Author here: Linux has made progress in this area, but I think that Windows is still better. Maybe I'm wrong (I haven't used Linux in a while) but I think when Linux developers say that they have excellent support for debug symbols this just means that they don't realize how good it is on Windows. I can load a crash dump or ETW profiling trace that has come from a customer using any version of Windows and load it up on my machine and the debug symbols just appear. Windows 11? Windows 10? Windows 7? Some random patch level? It doesn't matter - they just show up. When I worked on Chrome I had that symbol server configured as well, so any combination of old Chrome version and Windows version would just work. It's really magical. In addition, Chrome source code would automatically show up as I explored the crash dump. That's source indexing which is separate but related, and also magical. If some Linux variants work this well, then that is great. Last time I tried I found there were many different steps and debug packages to install just to get all of the symbols for my local Linux install, and handling other Linux installs was more complicated. This is all I do to make it work on Windows: ```set _NT_SYMBOL_PATH=srvc:\Symbolshttps://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols;SRV*c:\symbols*h...``` |
This might be one of these cases in which Windows had to become better. On Linux, you always could recompile everything yourself enabling debug symbols, but that's not an option on Windows.