|
|
|
|
|
|
by randomthoughtss
3369 days ago
|
|
|
Tracing is great but often gives you a low signal-to-noise ratio and for new code, is often missing for the bug you're trying to investigate. A debugger lets you add tracing as the system is executing, which in my experience is extremely productive, especially in C++ codebases where adding some logging can result in 10 minutes to rebuild and deploy. And I don't know what I would do without data breakpoints that give you the callstack and threading info when an address is written to. |
|
|
WRT the benefits of interactive debuggers, I definitely see the advantages of faster debug cycles. Luckily, it's not often that I need to worry about the 'often missing for the bug' / 'callstack and threading info when an address is written to' style of bug by virtue of working in codebases with strong coding standards and diligent code review. Most of the bugs I need to fix are 'developer didn't think of scenario S when writing feature F' or 'developer has forgotten edge-case E', rather than 'code is broken e.g. address re-use'.
And as I said in a cousin comment, I can't deploy a system with trace. That 10 minutes is just spent building :-p