[jgrahamc]

I saw Knuth talk at Kepler's Bookstore in Menlo Park some years ago. Someone asked him which language was better Java or C++. He replied: "Whichever has the better debugger".

[AndrewDucker]

Now _that_ is wisdom. It's the tooling that's important, of which the language is only one part.

[jiggy2011]

Are most debuggers now equivalent nowadays?

All I need it to do is set breakpoints and inspect variable/memory values.

[zvrba]

No, they aren't. With Java you can change code while the application is running and it will be hot-swapped after you have recompiled it.

I learned about this feature when playing a bit in Eclipse, forgot to kill the program between edits, and got a warning that the recompiled class couldn't be hot-swapped because its signature changed. And then I sat there in awe; I can just dream about this functioning reliably with C++.

[rieter]

Microsoft Visual C++ supported "Edit and Continue" for many many years.

[seabee]

I remember using this in MSVC 6 - so at least 14 years ago.

[zvrba]

"Supports", "works" and "is usable" are three totally different things. I doubt that E&C is truly usable since even much simpler things -- for example, data breakpoints when debugging native+managed code -- is unsupported in VS2010. (Needed exactly that today.) E&C is disabled also for C# as soon as you turn on native-code debugging.

[zdouglas]

Edit & continue is available with the V8 engine as well, so add JavaScript to the list of languages being unrighteously ignored.