Does adding pub to global change anything? I would guess that it is getting optimized out since it's unused and not pub.

I tried with referencing it, no luck

It's not only a Windows problem, I believe.
Even when you use it, if you make it pub or even if you export it, it makes no difference.
You can play with it here: https://godbolt.org/z/Yrocjf3T3
If you check, the C version has a little !dbg tag that the Zig version does not have.

It's not only a Windows problem, I believe. Even when you use it, if you make it pub or even if you export it, it makes no difference. You can play with it here: https://godbolt.org/z/Yrocjf3T3 If you check, the C version has a little !dbg tag that the Zig version does not have.

I don't think that's because of it, D has the same problem, even thought you can see the !dbg https://godbolt.org/z/5GGz3W1To

Yeah, I think I was wrong and I apologize. Actually exporting the variable works for me on Linux, you could try that in the meantime. The problem seems to be with namespaced non-exported global variables... I can't get to inspect them with GDB.

with export it finds the variable, but it doesn't understand what type it is:

Not fixed by #15349:

var global: i32 = 0;

pub fn main() !void {
    global += 124;
}

$ gdb ./test
(gdb) break test.main
Breakpoint 1 at 0x20af48: file test.zig, line 4.
(gdb) run
Starting program: /home/andy/Downloads/zig/build-release/test 

Breakpoint 1, test.main () at test.zig:4
4	    global += 124;
(gdb) p 'test.global'
$1 = <optimized out>
(gdb) 

Is there any progress on this? I'd like to help but I'm not really familiar with the Zig compiler infrastructure yet..

Can confirm this also happens while targeting thumb-freestanding-none and using the Cortex-Debug VSCode extension. At first I thought it could have been an extension issue but it's GDB that doesn't "see" the variable.