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You may receive a "warning LNK4018" warning message when you link a debug version of your application in Visual C++

Article ID: 146866

Article Last Modified on 1/11/2006

APPLIES TO

This article was previously published under Q146866

SYMPTOMS

When linking a debug version of your application, you may get the following warning message:
LINK : warning LNK4018: too many type indexes in PDB "filename", discarding subsequent type information
NOTE: You will not be able to see the subsequent types in the debugger.

CAUSE

The number of type indexes in the Program Database File (.pdb file) for your project exceeded 64K for Visual C++ 4.x and 16M for later versions. This is a limitation of the debugging format in a .pdb file. The format uses a 16-bit field to store the number of types. This field was increased to 24 bits in Visual C++ 5.0.

RESOLUTION

To avoid this warning, use one or more of the following methods to decrease the number of type indexes in your .pdb file:

  • Compile modules that you do not need to debug, without debugging information.
  • Break your project into multiple Dynamic Link Libraries (DLLs). You can use subprojects in Developer Studio to build the new libraries.
  • Use the compile time option /Yd. It will cause the type information for only those symbols that are referenced to be generated. This slows down builds somewhat but may lower the total number of symbols below the 64K limit.

STATUS

This behavior is by design.

MORE INFORMATION

You can review each object module to determine how many symbols it contains by using dumpbin /headers <file>.obj. The first section in the output tells how many symbols the object module contains.

With the introduction of Visual C++ 4.0, the size of the MFC libraries increased significantly and debugging information for the C run-time (CRT) libraries is now included in debug builds. These changes will increase the total number of type indexes in your project's .pdb file from earlier versions of Visual C++.

Additional query words: symbol missing cannot debug

Keywords: kbprb kbusage KB146866


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