Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by cjbgkagh 585 days ago
I would guess longer compile would encourage breakpoints over printf and this would be programming language specific.

Being able to change breakpoints at runtime helps a lot when tracking down something more complex. Visual Studio breakpoints are great, and they’ve added conditional breakpoints which are even better. Previously I would approximate this by having code specifically branch to hit a breakpoint, ‘if (X) { breakHere();}’

I write a fair amount of native C++ code but only call it from either Python or dotnet so when I make a mistake here it’s usually a segfault / memory access issue which kills the process. There might be a way to debug the C++ from dotnet or Python but logging to std out helps me isolate the location of the issue which is sufficient. It’s not a big enough problem and I worry that either writing tests in C++ or learning a native debugger will pay off in time saved.