DWARF (short for Debug With Arbitrary Record Format although rarely seen that way) is a widely used, standardized debugging data format.

DWARF was originally introduced along with Executable and Linkable Format. It proved to be excessively voluminous, and it was superseded by an incompatible successor DWARF-2, which added various encoding schemes to reduce data size.

DWARF was not immediately successful; for instance, when Sun Microsystems adopted ELF as part of their move to Solaris Operating Environment, they opted to continue using stabs, in an embedding known as stabs-in-elf. Linux followed suit, and DWARF-2 did not become the default until the late 1990s.

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