Related
How does the compilation and linking process work?
(Note: This is meant to be an entry to Stack Overflow's C++ FAQ. If you want to critique the idea of providing an FAQ in this form, then the posting on meta that started all this would be the place to do that. Answers to that question are monitored in the C++ chatroom, where the FAQ idea started out in the first place, so your answer is very likely to get read by those who came up with the idea.)
The compilation of a C++ program involves three steps:
Preprocessing: the preprocessor takes a C++ source code file and deals with the #includes, #defines and other preprocessor directives. The output of this step is a "pure" C++ file without pre-processor directives.
Compilation: the compiler takes the pre-processor's output and produces an object file from it.
Linking: the linker takes the object files produced by the compiler and produces either a library or an executable file.
Preprocessing
The preprocessor handles the preprocessor directives, like #include and #define. It is agnostic of the syntax of C++, which is why it must be used with care.
It works on one C++ source file at a time by replacing #include directives with the content of the respective files (which is usually just declarations), doing replacement of macros (#define), and selecting different portions of text depending of #if, #ifdef and #ifndef directives.
The preprocessor works on a stream of preprocessing tokens. Macro substitution is defined as replacing tokens with other tokens (the operator ## enables merging two tokens when it makes sense).
After all this, the preprocessor produces a single output that is a stream of tokens resulting from the transformations described above. It also adds some special markers that tell the compiler where each line came from so that it can use those to produce sensible error messages.
Some errors can be produced at this stage with clever use of the #if and #error directives.
Compilation
The compilation step is performed on each output of the preprocessor. The compiler parses the pure C++ source code (now without any preprocessor directives) and converts it into assembly code. Then invokes underlying back-end(assembler in toolchain) that assembles that code into machine code producing actual binary file in some format(ELF, COFF, a.out, ...). This object file contains the compiled code (in binary form) of the symbols defined in the input. Symbols in object files are referred to by name.
Object files can refer to symbols that are not defined. This is the case when you use a declaration, and don't provide a definition for it. The compiler doesn't mind this, and will happily produce the object file as long as the source code is well-formed.
Compilers usually let you stop compilation at this point. This is very useful because with it you can compile each source code file separately. The advantage this provides is that you don't need to recompile everything if you only change a single file.
The produced object files can be put in special archives called static libraries, for easier reusing later on.
It's at this stage that "regular" compiler errors, like syntax errors or failed overload resolution errors, are reported.
Linking
The linker is what produces the final compilation output from the object files the compiler produced. This output can be either a shared (or dynamic) library (and while the name is similar, they haven't got much in common with static libraries mentioned earlier) or an executable.
It links all the object files by replacing the references to undefined symbols with the correct addresses. Each of these symbols can be defined in other object files or in libraries. If they are defined in libraries other than the standard library, you need to tell the linker about them.
At this stage the most common errors are missing definitions or duplicate definitions. The former means that either the definitions don't exist (i.e. they are not written), or that the object files or libraries where they reside were not given to the linker. The latter is obvious: the same symbol was defined in two different object files or libraries.
This topic is discussed at CProgramming.com:
https://www.cprogramming.com/compilingandlinking.html
Here is what the author there wrote:
Compiling isn't quite the same as creating an executable file!
Instead, creating an executable is a multistage process divided into
two components: compilation and linking. In reality, even if a program
"compiles fine" it might not actually work because of errors during
the linking phase. The total process of going from source code files
to an executable might better be referred to as a build.
Compilation
Compilation refers to the processing of source code files (.c, .cc, or
.cpp) and the creation of an 'object' file. This step doesn't create
anything the user can actually run. Instead, the compiler merely
produces the machine language instructions that correspond to the
source code file that was compiled. For instance, if you compile (but
don't link) three separate files, you will have three object files
created as output, each with the name .o or .obj
(the extension will depend on your compiler). Each of these files
contains a translation of your source code file into a machine
language file -- but you can't run them yet! You need to turn them
into executables your operating system can use. That's where the
linker comes in.
Linking
Linking refers to the creation of a single executable file from
multiple object files. In this step, it is common that the linker will
complain about undefined functions (commonly, main itself). During
compilation, if the compiler could not find the definition for a
particular function, it would just assume that the function was
defined in another file. If this isn't the case, there's no way the
compiler would know -- it doesn't look at the contents of more than
one file at a time. The linker, on the other hand, may look at
multiple files and try to find references for the functions that
weren't mentioned.
You might ask why there are separate compilation and linking steps.
First, it's probably easier to implement things that way. The compiler
does its thing, and the linker does its thing -- by keeping the
functions separate, the complexity of the program is reduced. Another
(more obvious) advantage is that this allows the creation of large
programs without having to redo the compilation step every time a file
is changed. Instead, using so called "conditional compilation", it is
necessary to compile only those source files that have changed; for
the rest, the object files are sufficient input for the linker.
Finally, this makes it simple to implement libraries of pre-compiled
code: just create object files and link them just like any other
object file. (The fact that each file is compiled separately from
information contained in other files, incidentally, is called the
"separate compilation model".)
To get the full benefits of condition compilation, it's probably
easier to get a program to help you than to try and remember which
files you've changed since you last compiled. (You could, of course,
just recompile every file that has a timestamp greater than the
timestamp of the corresponding object file.) If you're working with an
integrated development environment (IDE) it may already take care of
this for you. If you're using command line tools, there's a nifty
utility called make that comes with most *nix distributions. Along
with conditional compilation, it has several other nice features for
programming, such as allowing different compilations of your program
-- for instance, if you have a version producing verbose output for debugging.
Knowing the difference between the compilation phase and the link
phase can make it easier to hunt for bugs. Compiler errors are usually
syntactic in nature -- a missing semicolon, an extra parenthesis.
Linking errors usually have to do with missing or multiple
definitions. If you get an error that a function or variable is
defined multiple times from the linker, that's a good indication that
the error is that two of your source code files have the same function
or variable.
GCC compiles a C/C++ program into executable in 4 steps.
For example, gcc -o hello hello.c is carried out as follows:
1. Pre-processing
Preprocessing via the GNU C Preprocessor (cpp.exe), which includes
the headers (#include) and expands the macros (#define).
cpp hello.c > hello.i
The resultant intermediate file "hello.i" contains the expanded source code.
2. Compilation
The compiler compiles the pre-processed source code into assembly code for a specific processor.
gcc -S hello.i
The -S option specifies to produce assembly code, instead of object code. The resultant assembly file is "hello.s".
3. Assembly
The assembler (as.exe) converts the assembly code into machine code in the object file "hello.o".
as -o hello.o hello.s
4. Linker
Finally, the linker (ld.exe) links the object code with the library code to produce an executable file "hello".
ld -o hello hello.o ...libraries...
On the standard front:
a translation unit is the combination of a source files, included headers and source files less any source lines skipped by conditional inclusion preprocessor directive.
the standard defines 9 phases in the translation. The first four correspond to preprocessing, the next three are the compilation, the next one is the instantiation of templates (producing instantiation units) and the last one is the linking.
In practice the eighth phase (the instantiation of templates) is often done during the compilation process but some compilers delay it to the linking phase and some spread it in the two.
The skinny is that a CPU loads data from memory addresses, stores data to memory addresses, and execute instructions sequentially out of memory addresses, with some conditional jumps in the sequence of instructions processed. Each of these three categories of instructions involves computing an address to a memory cell to be used in the machine instruction. Because machine instructions are of a variable length depending on the particular instruction involved, and because we string a variable length of them together as we build our machine code, there is a two step process involved in calculating and building any addresses.
First we laying out the allocation of memory as best we can before we can know what exactly goes in each cell. We figure out the bytes, or words, or whatever that form the instructions and literals and any data. We just start allocating memory and building the values that will create the program as we go, and note down anyplace we need to go back and fix an address. In that place we put a dummy to just pad the location so we can continue to calculate memory size. For example our first machine code might take one cell. The next machine code might take 3 cells, involving one machine code cell and two address cells. Now our address pointer is 4. We know what goes in the machine cell, which is the op code, but we have to wait to calculate what goes in the address cells till we know where that data will be located, i.e. what will be the machine address of that data.
If there were just one source file a compiler could theoretically produce fully executable machine code without a linker. In a two pass process it could calculate all of the actual addresses to all of the data cells referenced by any machine load or store instructions. And it could calculate all of the absolute addresses referenced by any absolute jump instructions. This is how simpler compilers, like the one in Forth work, with no linker.
A linker is something that allows blocks of code to be compiled separately. This can speed up the overall process of building code, and allows some flexibility with how the blocks are later used, in other words they can be relocated in memory, for example adding 1000 to every address to scoot the block up by 1000 address cells.
So what the compiler outputs is rough machine code that is not yet fully built, but is laid out so we know the size of everything, in other words so we can start to calculate where all of the absolute addresses will be located. the compiler also outputs a list of symbols which are name/address pairs. The symbols relate a memory offset in the machine code in the module with a name. The offset being the absolute distance to the memory location of the symbol in the module.
That's where we get to the linker. The linker first slaps all of these blocks of machine code together end to end and notes down where each one starts. Then it calculates the addresses to be fixed by adding together the relative offset within a module and the absolute position of the module in the bigger layout.
Obviously I've oversimplified this so you can try to grasp it, and I have deliberately not used the jargon of object files, symbol tables, etc. which to me is part of the confusion.
I've been able to make a fair amount of progress in trying to add Bazel build files to enable the building of the gennorm2 tool in ICU. Here is my work-in-progress PR using the Bazel target //icu4c/source/tools/gennorm2.
I'm currently getting stuck when running bazelisk build //icu4c/source/tools/gennorm2 --verbose_failures --sandbox_debug with these errors.
They reference functions defined in urename.h. As I understand it, urename.h is also used to rename certain functions by appending a suffix with the version number (_68), but I defined a preprocessor constant U_DISABLE_RENAMING to disable that specific behavior. This only had the effect of changing the names of the undefined function names in the error output, but otherwise not changing it (ex: errors now complain of u_errorName instead of u_errorName_68).
The part that puzzles me is why the error output claims that these symbols are not found. As you can see, the target //icu4c/source/tools/gennorm2 depends on //icu4c/source/common:platform, which in turn depends on //icu4c/source/common:headers, which includes the field hdrs = glob(["unicode/*.h", "unicode/*.h",]), which should be matching
/icu4c/source/common/unicode/urename.h.
In case it helps, this is the verbose log output when running make VERBOSE=1 using the current autotools-based configure + make build on a fresh checkout of ICU.
A teammate was able to take a look and help me reason through the errors and ultimately fix them.
The first thing is to acknowledge that it is indeed a linker error, which can see by noticing the error message references the linker program ld.
This is important because we previously spent time in the wrong place by debugging the compile configs as if the problem happened during the compile phase before the linker phase. (But I learned about one way to debug compile problems is taking the raw GCC command given by --verbose_failures --sandbox_debug and replacing -c with -E and changing the argument of -o to a .txt file in /tmp to save the output what the compiler sees for that file after all the includes are recursively inlined). This means that my attempts to solve the problem by specifying preprocessor defines for the compile-phase were misguided.
The project's documentation on dependencies revealed that I had mis-specified a dependency on one of the targets to specify only the headers (//icu4c/source/common:headers) instead of the relevant definitions and headers (//icu4c/source/common:platform).
After doing that, we solved another problem that was small and interesting. The gennorm2 target depends on code to get the current year (ex: for printing out help messages that include the copyright statement with the year range). As an i18n library, ICU has code to get that, somewhere in //icu4c/source/i18n:icu4ci18n. This creates an excessive amount of code dependencies for an isolated use case (and will cause problems for follow-on work), so we replaced the block of code in gennorm2 calling those calendar year fns (ucal_open, ucal_getNow, ucal_setMillis, ucal_get, ucal_close) with the libc date library function to give us the year as a number, and added linkopts = ["-ldl"] to link in the dl date library.
How does the compilation and linking process work?
(Note: This is meant to be an entry to Stack Overflow's C++ FAQ. If you want to critique the idea of providing an FAQ in this form, then the posting on meta that started all this would be the place to do that. Answers to that question are monitored in the C++ chatroom, where the FAQ idea started out in the first place, so your answer is very likely to get read by those who came up with the idea.)
The compilation of a C++ program involves three steps:
Preprocessing: the preprocessor takes a C++ source code file and deals with the #includes, #defines and other preprocessor directives. The output of this step is a "pure" C++ file without pre-processor directives.
Compilation: the compiler takes the pre-processor's output and produces an object file from it.
Linking: the linker takes the object files produced by the compiler and produces either a library or an executable file.
Preprocessing
The preprocessor handles the preprocessor directives, like #include and #define. It is agnostic of the syntax of C++, which is why it must be used with care.
It works on one C++ source file at a time by replacing #include directives with the content of the respective files (which is usually just declarations), doing replacement of macros (#define), and selecting different portions of text depending of #if, #ifdef and #ifndef directives.
The preprocessor works on a stream of preprocessing tokens. Macro substitution is defined as replacing tokens with other tokens (the operator ## enables merging two tokens when it makes sense).
After all this, the preprocessor produces a single output that is a stream of tokens resulting from the transformations described above. It also adds some special markers that tell the compiler where each line came from so that it can use those to produce sensible error messages.
Some errors can be produced at this stage with clever use of the #if and #error directives.
Compilation
The compilation step is performed on each output of the preprocessor. The compiler parses the pure C++ source code (now without any preprocessor directives) and converts it into assembly code. Then invokes underlying back-end(assembler in toolchain) that assembles that code into machine code producing actual binary file in some format(ELF, COFF, a.out, ...). This object file contains the compiled code (in binary form) of the symbols defined in the input. Symbols in object files are referred to by name.
Object files can refer to symbols that are not defined. This is the case when you use a declaration, and don't provide a definition for it. The compiler doesn't mind this, and will happily produce the object file as long as the source code is well-formed.
Compilers usually let you stop compilation at this point. This is very useful because with it you can compile each source code file separately. The advantage this provides is that you don't need to recompile everything if you only change a single file.
The produced object files can be put in special archives called static libraries, for easier reusing later on.
It's at this stage that "regular" compiler errors, like syntax errors or failed overload resolution errors, are reported.
Linking
The linker is what produces the final compilation output from the object files the compiler produced. This output can be either a shared (or dynamic) library (and while the name is similar, they haven't got much in common with static libraries mentioned earlier) or an executable.
It links all the object files by replacing the references to undefined symbols with the correct addresses. Each of these symbols can be defined in other object files or in libraries. If they are defined in libraries other than the standard library, you need to tell the linker about them.
At this stage the most common errors are missing definitions or duplicate definitions. The former means that either the definitions don't exist (i.e. they are not written), or that the object files or libraries where they reside were not given to the linker. The latter is obvious: the same symbol was defined in two different object files or libraries.
This topic is discussed at CProgramming.com:
https://www.cprogramming.com/compilingandlinking.html
Here is what the author there wrote:
Compiling isn't quite the same as creating an executable file!
Instead, creating an executable is a multistage process divided into
two components: compilation and linking. In reality, even if a program
"compiles fine" it might not actually work because of errors during
the linking phase. The total process of going from source code files
to an executable might better be referred to as a build.
Compilation
Compilation refers to the processing of source code files (.c, .cc, or
.cpp) and the creation of an 'object' file. This step doesn't create
anything the user can actually run. Instead, the compiler merely
produces the machine language instructions that correspond to the
source code file that was compiled. For instance, if you compile (but
don't link) three separate files, you will have three object files
created as output, each with the name .o or .obj
(the extension will depend on your compiler). Each of these files
contains a translation of your source code file into a machine
language file -- but you can't run them yet! You need to turn them
into executables your operating system can use. That's where the
linker comes in.
Linking
Linking refers to the creation of a single executable file from
multiple object files. In this step, it is common that the linker will
complain about undefined functions (commonly, main itself). During
compilation, if the compiler could not find the definition for a
particular function, it would just assume that the function was
defined in another file. If this isn't the case, there's no way the
compiler would know -- it doesn't look at the contents of more than
one file at a time. The linker, on the other hand, may look at
multiple files and try to find references for the functions that
weren't mentioned.
You might ask why there are separate compilation and linking steps.
First, it's probably easier to implement things that way. The compiler
does its thing, and the linker does its thing -- by keeping the
functions separate, the complexity of the program is reduced. Another
(more obvious) advantage is that this allows the creation of large
programs without having to redo the compilation step every time a file
is changed. Instead, using so called "conditional compilation", it is
necessary to compile only those source files that have changed; for
the rest, the object files are sufficient input for the linker.
Finally, this makes it simple to implement libraries of pre-compiled
code: just create object files and link them just like any other
object file. (The fact that each file is compiled separately from
information contained in other files, incidentally, is called the
"separate compilation model".)
To get the full benefits of condition compilation, it's probably
easier to get a program to help you than to try and remember which
files you've changed since you last compiled. (You could, of course,
just recompile every file that has a timestamp greater than the
timestamp of the corresponding object file.) If you're working with an
integrated development environment (IDE) it may already take care of
this for you. If you're using command line tools, there's a nifty
utility called make that comes with most *nix distributions. Along
with conditional compilation, it has several other nice features for
programming, such as allowing different compilations of your program
-- for instance, if you have a version producing verbose output for debugging.
Knowing the difference between the compilation phase and the link
phase can make it easier to hunt for bugs. Compiler errors are usually
syntactic in nature -- a missing semicolon, an extra parenthesis.
Linking errors usually have to do with missing or multiple
definitions. If you get an error that a function or variable is
defined multiple times from the linker, that's a good indication that
the error is that two of your source code files have the same function
or variable.
GCC compiles a C/C++ program into executable in 4 steps.
For example, gcc -o hello hello.c is carried out as follows:
1. Pre-processing
Preprocessing via the GNU C Preprocessor (cpp.exe), which includes
the headers (#include) and expands the macros (#define).
cpp hello.c > hello.i
The resultant intermediate file "hello.i" contains the expanded source code.
2. Compilation
The compiler compiles the pre-processed source code into assembly code for a specific processor.
gcc -S hello.i
The -S option specifies to produce assembly code, instead of object code. The resultant assembly file is "hello.s".
3. Assembly
The assembler (as.exe) converts the assembly code into machine code in the object file "hello.o".
as -o hello.o hello.s
4. Linker
Finally, the linker (ld.exe) links the object code with the library code to produce an executable file "hello".
ld -o hello hello.o ...libraries...
On the standard front:
a translation unit is the combination of a source files, included headers and source files less any source lines skipped by conditional inclusion preprocessor directive.
the standard defines 9 phases in the translation. The first four correspond to preprocessing, the next three are the compilation, the next one is the instantiation of templates (producing instantiation units) and the last one is the linking.
In practice the eighth phase (the instantiation of templates) is often done during the compilation process but some compilers delay it to the linking phase and some spread it in the two.
The skinny is that a CPU loads data from memory addresses, stores data to memory addresses, and execute instructions sequentially out of memory addresses, with some conditional jumps in the sequence of instructions processed. Each of these three categories of instructions involves computing an address to a memory cell to be used in the machine instruction. Because machine instructions are of a variable length depending on the particular instruction involved, and because we string a variable length of them together as we build our machine code, there is a two step process involved in calculating and building any addresses.
First we laying out the allocation of memory as best we can before we can know what exactly goes in each cell. We figure out the bytes, or words, or whatever that form the instructions and literals and any data. We just start allocating memory and building the values that will create the program as we go, and note down anyplace we need to go back and fix an address. In that place we put a dummy to just pad the location so we can continue to calculate memory size. For example our first machine code might take one cell. The next machine code might take 3 cells, involving one machine code cell and two address cells. Now our address pointer is 4. We know what goes in the machine cell, which is the op code, but we have to wait to calculate what goes in the address cells till we know where that data will be located, i.e. what will be the machine address of that data.
If there were just one source file a compiler could theoretically produce fully executable machine code without a linker. In a two pass process it could calculate all of the actual addresses to all of the data cells referenced by any machine load or store instructions. And it could calculate all of the absolute addresses referenced by any absolute jump instructions. This is how simpler compilers, like the one in Forth work, with no linker.
A linker is something that allows blocks of code to be compiled separately. This can speed up the overall process of building code, and allows some flexibility with how the blocks are later used, in other words they can be relocated in memory, for example adding 1000 to every address to scoot the block up by 1000 address cells.
So what the compiler outputs is rough machine code that is not yet fully built, but is laid out so we know the size of everything, in other words so we can start to calculate where all of the absolute addresses will be located. the compiler also outputs a list of symbols which are name/address pairs. The symbols relate a memory offset in the machine code in the module with a name. The offset being the absolute distance to the memory location of the symbol in the module.
That's where we get to the linker. The linker first slaps all of these blocks of machine code together end to end and notes down where each one starts. Then it calculates the addresses to be fixed by adding together the relative offset within a module and the absolute position of the module in the bigger layout.
Obviously I've oversimplified this so you can try to grasp it, and I have deliberately not used the jargon of object files, symbol tables, etc. which to me is part of the confusion.
My code is linking against several other libraries that are also developed at my company, one of these libraries is redefining several values from errno.h, I would like to be able to fix this, however I am having trouble finding the exact file that is redefining these values, I am want to know if there is a way to make the compiler tell me when a file has defined a particular value.
You can probably do it by adding -include errno.h to the command line that builds the library in question. Here's a quick example. I have a C program called "file.c":
#define ESRCH 8
That's it - then I compile with:
cc -c -include errno.h file.c
And presto, a compiler warning:
file.c:1:1: warning: "ESRCH" redefined
In file included from /usr/include/errno.h:23,
from <command-line>:0:
/usr/include/sys/errno.h:84:1: warning: this is the location of the previous definition
That will tell you where your bad definitions are.
Have you tried searching with grep?
If you don't want to search through all your headers for the particular #define, you could use
#undef YOUR_MANIFEST_CONSTANT
after each #include in your source module and then start removing them from the bottom up and see where your definitions come from.
Also, your compiler may tell you that a #define has been redefined. Turn all your warnings on.
With GCC I did something similar with:
g++ input.cc -dD -E > cpp.out
-dD tells cpp to print all defines where they were defined. And in the cpp output there are also markers for the include file names and the line numbers.
It is possible that some environments, I'm thinking IDE's here, have configuration options tied into the "project settings" rather than using a configuration header. If you work with a lot of other developers in a place where this behavior is NOT frowned on then you might also check your tool settings.
Most compilers will tell you where the problem is, you have to look and think about what the diagnostic notification is telling you.
Short of that, grep/findstr on *nix/Windows is your friend.
If that yields nothing then check for tool settings in your build system.
Some IDE's will jump to the correct location if you right click on the usage and select 'go to definition'.
Another option if you're really stuck is a command line option on the compiler. Most compilers have an option to output the assembler they generate when compiling C++ code.
You can view this assembler (which has comments letting you know the relative line number in the C++ source file). You don't have to understand the assembler but you can see what value was used and what files and definitions were included when the compiler ran. Check your compiler's documentation for the exact option to use
Linux/Gcc/LD - Toolchain.
I would like to remove STL/Boost debug symbols from libraries and executable, for two reasons:
Linking gets very slow for big programs
Debugging jumps into stl/boost code, which is annoying
For 1. incremental linking would be a big improvement, but AFAIK ld does not support incremental linking. There is a workaround "pseudo incremental linking" in an 1999 dr.dobb's journal (not in the web any more, but at archive.org (the idea is to put everything in a dynamic library and all updated object files in an second one that is loaded first) but this is not really a general solution.
For 2. there is a script here, but a) it did not work for me (it did not remove symbols), b) it is very slow as it works at the end of the pipe, while it would be more efficient to remove the symbols earlier.
Obviously, the other debug symbols should stay in place.
GNU strip accepts regex arguments to --strip-symbols=
The STL and boost symbols are name-mangled because of the namespaces they're in. I don't have GCC binutils handy at this moment, but just peek at the name mangling used for namespaces and construct the regex for 'symbols from namespace X' and pass this to --strip-symbols=
As far as I know there's no real option to do what you want in gcc. The main problem being that all the code you want to strip debug symbols for is defined in headers.
Otherwhise it would be possible to build a library separatly, strip that, and link with the stripped version.
But only getting debug symbols from certain parts of a compilation unit, while building and linking (for your desired link time speedup) is not possible in gcc as far as I know.
You probably don't want to strip the debug symbols from the shared libraries, as you may need that at some point.
If you are using GDB or DDD to debug, you may be able to get away with removing the Boost source files from the Source Path so it can't trace into the functions. (Or just don't trace into them, trace over!)
You can remove the option to compile the program with debug symbols, which will speed the link time.
Like the script you link to, you can consult the strip program ("man strip") to remove all or certain symbols.
You may want to use strip.
strip --strip-unneeded --strip-debug libfoo.so
Why don't you just build without debugging in the first place though?
This answer provides some specifics that I needed to make MSalters' answer work for removing STL symbols.
The STL symbol names are mangled. The trick is to find a regular expression that covers these names. I looked these symbols up with GNU's Binutils:
> nm --debug-syms <objectfile>
I basically searched on STL functions, like resize. If this is difficult, the output becomes readable when using the following command:
> nm --debug-syms --demangle <objectfile>
Look up a line number containing an STL function call, then look up it's mangled name on that same line number using the first provided command. This allowed me to see that all STL symbol names began with _ZNSt[0-9]+ or _ZSt[0-9]+, etc.
To allow GNU Strip to remove these symbols I used:
> strip --wildcard \
--strip-symbol='_ZNKSt*' \
--strip-symbol='_ZNSt*' \
--strip-symbol='_ZSt*' \
--strip-symbol='_ZNSa*' \
<objectfile>
I used these commands directly on the compiled/linked binary. I verified the removal of these symbols by comparing the output of nm before and after the removal (I wrote the output to files and used vimdiff). The --wildcard option allows the use of regular expressions. Although I would expect [0-9]* to mean 0 to an infinite amount of numbers, here it actually means 1 number followed by an infinite amount of anything (until the end of the line).
If you are looking to not step into STL code this can be achieved by gdb's skip file command, as done here.
Hope it helps
Which compiler are you using? For example, if I understand your question correctly, this is a trivial matter in MS Visual Studio.