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by BobbyTables2 283 days ago
Fully agree.

If I find myself using a debugger it’s usually one two things: - freshly written low level assembly code that isn’t working - basic userspace app crash (in C) where whipping out gdb is faster than adding prints and recompiling.

Even never needed a debugger for complex kernel drivers — just prints.
1 comments
ehnto 283 days ago
I guess I struggle to see how it's easier to print debug, if the debugger is right there I find it way faster.

Perhaps the debugging experience in different languages and IDEs is the elephant in the room, and we are all just talking past eachother.

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prerok 283 days ago
Indeed, depends on deployment and type of application.

If the customer has their own deployment of the app (on their own server or computer), then all you have to go with, when they report a problem, are logs. Of course, you also have to have a way to obtain those logs. In such cases, it's way better for the developers to also never use debugger, because they are then forced to ensure during development that logs do contain sufficient information to pinpoint a problem.

Using a debugger also already means that you can reproduce the problem yourself, which is already half of the solution :)

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AlotOfReading 283 days ago
One from work: another team is willing to support exactly two build modes in their projects: release mode, or full debug info for everything. Loading the full debug info into a debugger takes 30m+ and will fail if the computer goes to sleep midway through.

I just debug release mode instead, where print debug is usually nicer than a debugger without symbols. I could fix the situation other ways, but a non-reversible debugger doesn't justify the effort for me.

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yoz-y 283 days ago
Exactly. At work for example I use the dev tools debugger all the time, but lldb for c++ only when running unit tests (because our server harness is too large and debug builds are too large and slow). I’ve never really used an IDE for python.

When using Xcode the debugger is right there and so it is in qt creator. I’ve tried making it work in vim many times and just gave up at some point.

The environment definitely is the main selector.

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BobbyTables2 281 days ago
On non-x86 embedded platforms, a hardware debugger can be a pain (if even possible) and system emulation using QEMU usually isn’t available.

But yeah, user space debugging with a software debugger (gdb, etc…) is certainly useful for some things.

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