DWARF
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DWARF (short for Debug With Arbitrary Record Format although rarely seen that way) is a widely used, standardized debugging data format.
DWARF was originally introduced along with ELF. It proved to be excessively voluminous, and it was superseded by an incompatible successor DWARF-2, which added various encoding schemes to reduce data size.
DWARF was not immediately successful; for instance, when Sun Microsystems adopted ELF as part of their move to Solaris, they opted to continue using stabs, in an embedding known as stabs-in-elf. Linux followed suit, and DWARF-2 did not become the default until the late 1990s.