Gcc 4.8 DWARF4 vs DWARF2

Question

GCC 4.8 supports DWARF4. I'm wondering what is the difference between DWARF4 and DWARF2 from user point of view.

Lets look at it from GDB point of view. Is there any difference for users when you switch to DWARF4?

I have found a Dwarf Home Page, but as far as i can see there is nowhere on the web information about difference from user POV.

Can you point me those differencies?

Answer 1

The first version of DWARF proved to use excessive amounts of storage, DWARF-2, superseded it and added various encoding schemes to reduce data size, later on Version 4 of DWARF, which offers improved data compression, better description of optimized code, and support for new language features in C++.

Usually release notes of or anouncement summarize these differences (there would be many more)

http://dwarfstd.org/Announcement.php

http://dwarfstd.org/PressRelease.php