title: What does the w flag mean when passed in via the ldflags option to the go command?
body: <p>Context: </p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>go 1.2, ubuntu 12.10</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>Goal:</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>Reduce size of compiled binaries</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>Currently in my build process, I run "go install" to generate the binary.
  The I read from somewhere that if I pass in <code>-w</code> it will shrink the binary.
  I tried it by passing it into the <code>-ldflags</code> option &amp; my binary lost 1MB in size.</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>Is this <code>-w</code> flag documented anywhere? What does it actually do?</li>
  <li>I then discovered the <code>strip -s &lt;binary&gt;</code> command and ran that on top of <code>-w</code> and got
  another weight loss of 750KB ! The resulting binary runs fine. Does stripping
  cause problems in any situations ?</li>
  </ol>