When I do a release build with gcc (i.e. I do not specify -g), I still seem to end up with symbols in the binary, and have to use strip to remove them. In fact, I can still breakpoint functions and get backtraces in gdb (albeit without line numbers).

This surprised me - can anyone explain why this happens?

e.g.

#include <stdio.h>

static void blah(void)
{
    printf("hello world\n");
}
int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
    blah();
    return 0;
}

gcc -o foo foo.c

nm foo | grep blah:

08048374 t blah