[piyush_soni]

I newly joined this company, and they have 20 years old codebase which is mix of C and Scheme code. The only way they debug the massive Scheme part is using print statements. And I only have bad things to say about that. :( If there's a better way all of them have been missing, I'd love to hear that. I've learned that they have adapted the MIT Scheme implementation to add Object Oriented features, and it "kind of" works like an object oriented language, except when it doesn't - which happens a lot. It's a mess.

[NotRustAgain]

Pretty much every 20 year old codebase is a mix of terrible stuff. The exceptions are rare and usually involve a strong handed dictator who is willing to make cleanups from time to time.

You're lucky it isn't Fortran and a homegrown (crappy) macro language.... You can't fairly judge Scheme or C from a legacy codebase unless you judge every other language that way too.

[piyush_soni]

I'm judging only from its debugging capabilities - and it looks like even now there's no (open to all) way to do that. Compared to that, C even if that's 20 years old code too, has some great debugging tools for it.

[sklogic]

> The only way they debug the massive Scheme part is using print statements.

Why would you need anything else for debugging?!?

[piyush_soni]

See I'm so naive I don't even know if this is sarcasm. :/

[sklogic]

I'm 100% serious. Interactive debugging is hugely overrated. I am not aware of a debugging technique better than logging + contracts + asserts.

[piyush_soni]

For one, that forces you to change the code and recompile all the time. And some projects have huge recompile times.

[sklogic]

And compiling in a debug mode also results in huge recompile times. Is it such a problem?

There is no big difference between building with contracts and logs on (log level is selected dynamically, no need to recompile) and building with debug symbols/suppressed optimisations.