Add compiler option to strip symbols from generated binaries

[GabrielMajeri]

There's a long standing Cargo issue, requesting the ability to strip symbols from built Rust binaries.

@alexcrichton suggested here that

This might be best done as a rust-lang/rust PR first which has access to target information to know what flag should be passed to the linker. For example this could be added as -C strip or something like that. We could then add a profile setting for Cargo to configure that on the Cargo side of things afterwards.

I'm opening this issue to discuss adding such a -C strip flag and to track its implementation in the compiler.

Right now, it could be a simple boolean flag, which passes an additional option to the linker (since, AFAIK, most linkers have some sort of flag for stripping symbols from the final binaries).

[ehuss]

I'm uncertain, but isn't -Zstrip-debuginfo-if-disabled essentially the same?

[GabrielMajeri]

I'm uncertain, but isn't -Zstrip-debuginfo-if-disabled essentially the same?

As far as I understand, this will only remove debug symbols, while the issue is about striping all symbol information (this means removing all symbols from an executable, and non-exported symbols for a dynamic library). What I am proposing would affect the size of release builds too.

This is analogous to the --strip-all and --strip-debug linker flags (and I believe this will only be achievable by configuring the linker).

[petrochenkov]

#71825 (comment) suggests introducing -Z strip=[none|debuginfo|symbols].