Meaningful comparison of CTF and DWARF

What you say is true: scope creep is a problem in all software systems. It's just something to watch out for, I suppose. But note that CTF has an internal section layout system, so even if it does creep like hell there won't be a size penalty if the extra bits are in sections which are optional (there are many optional sections already). There would still be a complexity penalty, though, which matters a great deal to me.

I do want to keep CTF tightly focused on type introspection. The backtrace stuff is going to be in an optional CTF section and will only be generated if you ask for it: it hasn't had any implications for other, existing parts of CTF in any of my various half-designs so far. It just uses them. It could potentially be an entirely separate library, generating a separate ELF section, though given how painful it is to add more ELF sections I'm very strongly inclined to keep it inside the .ctf ELF section in a new CTF section instead, so the ELF machinery need not know it is there.

> and likely won't happen since the CTF maintainers presumably don't much care about DWARF

Well, I *am* the CTF maintainer right now and I do care about DWARF. :) It's hard to avoid caring about it since if you want to do debugging of anything with, say, scopes in it, DWARF is the right thing, not CTF.