Option -s of bcstrip was added in abc-interpreter@49085f9c.

So there are basically three options:

1. Strip sections and symbol table (useful when you just want to interpret)
2. Strip sections but keep symbols (useful when you want to serialize/deserialize)
3. Don't strip (useful if you suspect a bug in the stripper)

Before you would need option 3 for using the serialization library, but now the most sensible default is option 2.