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by donadigo 1202 days ago
The article provides a pretty good overview of the landscape of debuggers out there. I find myself using printf debugging whenever something is a dynamically evolving state and I need to monitor just the relevant bits of it and breakpoints when something is either crashing or requiring a deeper thought about how the code executes.

That said, I still think there's quite a bit of improvement to be made, which is why I started building a new debugger for myself which puts a lot more focus on breakpoint-less workflow, speed of iteration and scripting ability: (demo) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJYoqfTfuQk It's geared mainly for gamedev, but I also do use it many times to e.g debug itself.

2 comments

That's an excellent observation which I think agrees with my own.

If you already have a good idea of the control flow (and thus, expected behavior), but there's some minute detail that goes wrong, you just need a few strategically placed prints to see the state evolution. If the problem is control flow related, you might first need to get a grasp of that before going into the weeds.

This looks great, very interesting approach! Augumenting the code of a running process using a scripting language is a cool idea, excited to see what comes next. I will definitely keep an eye on the project.