Avoid debugging information on golang

Question

I think that gc includes debugging information by default. However, I want to avoid decompilation.

How can I remove the debugging information when compiling go code with gc?

Note: Using gccgo doesn't solve the problem. If I don't compile with '-g' the executable is broken and only outputs:

no debug info in ELF executable errno -1 fatal error: no debug info in ELF executable

runtime stack: no debug info in ELF executable errno -1 panic during panic"

Answer 1

I recommend usage of -ldflags="-s -w" which removes symbol table and debugging information.

As a bonus with Go 1.13 -trimpath can be used to reduce length of file paths stored in the file

Answer 2

The go linker has a flag -w which disables DWARF debugging information generation. You can supply linker flags to go tool build commands as follows:

go build -ldflags '-w'

Another approach on Linux/Unix platforms is using command strip against the compiled binary. This seems to produce smaller binaries than the above linker option.