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by _wmd 2899 days ago
It seems you've mastered some dark art unknown to an entire industry, you should totally write a book

Meanwhile I'll rely on the smelly old debugger to dig me out of threading weirdness, memory corruption, resource leakages, other people's bugs, and to provide a window into a combinatorially massive input-dependent state my feeble mind simply can't fathom while writing tests for a tiny corner of a typical system that in aggregate amounts to millions of LOC.
2 comments
jjoonathan 2899 days ago
Nah, gradparent is not a wizard, just someone who has spent a lot of time in a single relatively simple environment that is mostly under their control. It's a beautiful thing when it happens. Most aren't so lucky.
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thedirt0115 2899 days ago
+1 to the above, it's just a different environment. I haven't used a debugger at my current (mostly Python) job at all, whereas at a previous job in C++, I was using gdb practically every day.
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tropo 2899 days ago
He is taking after Linus Torvalds, who resisted adding a kernel debugger for many years. Linus used console spew, PC speaker beeps, and storing a hash of file/line into the PC's time/date.
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jjoonathan 2899 days ago
... who resisted adding a kernel debugger for the explicit purpose of keeping casuals out of his zen garden, per your link below.

For people who don't have a hoard of elite developers banging down their gates to contribute code for free, I suspect the economics of being such a Prima Donna are not as attractive.

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hackcasual 2899 days ago
That's less not needing a debugger by design, more how challenging it is to debug an operating system.
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tropo 2899 days ago
Those last two (speaker and clock) yes, but otherwise no. Linus Torvalds really doesn't like using a debugger and he'd rather you didn't use one either. His words:

https://yarchive.net/comp/linux/debuggers.html

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Too 2898 days ago
Wow. Lets add some sleep in the compiler also so people will think harder about their code before compiling?
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tropo 2898 days ago
I think that is excessive, but it isn't entirely wrong.

I worked at a place with builds that took over 8 hours. We sure would think hard about our code.

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pmarreck 2899 days ago
He's not wrong.

I still maintain that debuggers are a design smell.

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pmarreck 2899 days ago
> threading weirdness, memory corruption, resource leakages, other people's bugs

Just as an FYI, most of these are theoretically eliminated or at least drastically mitigated by a switch from mutable state to immutable, purely-functional data structures. The cost of course being somewhat increased memory consumption and a bit more slowness (or a lot, depending on the algorithm).

If you ever get a chance to work with the BEAM VM, it's pretty tight.

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