Welcome to the DWARF Debugging Standard Website

DWARF is a debugging information file format used by many compilers and debuggers to support source level debugging. It addresses the requirements of a number of procedural languages, such as C, C++, and Fortran, and is designed to be extensible to other languages. DWARF is architecture independent and applicable to any processor or operating system. It is widely used on Unix, Linux and other operating systems, as well as in stand-alone environments.

DWARF Version 5

Version 5 of the DWARF Debugging Information Format Standard is now available.

While each revision of the standard documents the DWARF language codes that had been assigned as of the publication date, support for new languages may be added between revisions. View the up-to-date list of assigned language codes.

DWARF Version 6

Version 6 of the standard is currently under development. For a list of issues and proposals being considered, see the current issues page.

Snapshots of the Version 6 working draft can be found here. Please note that this is only a working draft, and may change substantially before Version 6 is finalized.

Public Comments

The DWARF Committee welcomes contributions of all forms.

To ask questions and participate in discussions about the DWARF format, please join the dwarf-discuss mailing list.

To submit a comment or suggestion for changing the standard, please go to the Public Comments page.

DWARF Introduction

For a quick introduction to DWARF, read Introduction to the DWARF Debugging Format (PDF, revised 2012), by Michael Eager.

About the DWARF Committee

The DWARF standard is maintained by the DWARF Debugging Information Format Committee, with members representing many companies working on compilers and debuggers.

Committee bylaws and other organizational documents can be found here.