[Lichtso]

One style that haven't seen discussed is a hybrid / mixture of in-code (e.g. printf trace-logs) and out-of-code (using external tools like an attached debugger) debugging.

What I do is I encode conditional breakpoints in the source code, (compile and) run the program with a debugger attached. The nice thing is you can have complex conditions using all kinds of functions from your surrounding code and you can have them permanently, even check them into the VCS. It is kind of like placing asserts which don't panic but trap into the debugger and they can be globally enabled / disabled.

[ghosty141]

Conditional breakpoints are supported for most dynamic languages. With static ones like c++ your way is the only practical way I believe

[thewebcount]

I program in a hybrid of C/C++/Objective-C/Objective-C++/Swift and can use conditional breakpoints in all of those languages in lldb and Xcode. There's nothing special about conditional breakpoints that makes them not work in compiled or static languages.

[fluoridation]

Visual Studio supports conditional and printing breakpoints for both C and C++. I tend to use them rarely because they really hurt performance, though. I only use them if I need to be able to turn them on and off at will, which hardcoded __debugbreak()s don't allow, obviously.

[mark_undoio]

I helped implement fast conditional breakpoints in UDB (time travel debugger for Linux) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcHcGeeJHSA

We used GDB's conditional breakpoint bytecode https://sourceware.org/gdb/onlinedocs/gdb/General-Bytecode-D... to get a speedup in the thousands of times vs plain conditional breakpoints.

That works for us because we've got in-process agent code that can evaluate the breakpoint condition without trapping. It should be possible to do this in other debuggers with a bit of work, though we have the advantage of in-process virtualisation to help hide this computation from the process.

[roca]

Pernosco combines conditions, logging, and interactive debugging in a really nice way. https://pernos.co/about/expressions/