yes and that's what I'm saying, I find it crazy to not split the debug info out. At least on my machine it really makes a noticeable difference of load time if I load a binary which is ~2GB with debug info in or the same binary which is ~100MB with debug info out.

Doesn't make any difference in practice. The debug info is never mapped into memory by the loader. This only matters if you want to store the two separate i.e lazy load debug symbols if needed.

this is just not true. I just tried with one of my binaries which is 3.2G unstripped, and 150MB-ish stripped. Unstripped takes 23 seconds until the window shows up, stripped takes ~a second

There is something wacky going on with your system, or the program is written in a way that makes it traverse the debug info if it is present. What program is it?

For example I can imagine desktop operating system antivirus/integrity checks having this effect.