We have noticed that debugger is not a very good debugging tool for our apps: interactive games with lots of events, animation, multiple threads etc. Stepping t

We have noticed that debugger is not a very good debugging tool for our apps: interactive games with lots of events, animation, multiple threads etc. Stepping through in debugger has turned out to be waste of time. What has worked? It's much better to produce detailed logs of some of the subsystems and analyze them. This way you get much better understanding of the big picture of what is happening. Why? In UI code (or event-driven code in general) state changes that cause bugs happen over time, not inside one step of an event loop. You just can't get the big picture of event-driven code with a debugger, which is optimized for going up and down callstack. We have build a custom tracing library (and yes, it uses a lot of MACROs) that allows us to do select what is traced in a very granular level. I can proudly say that it's wonderful tool, every UI platform should ship with something like that. By the way, tracing is also better for debugging parsers, their behavior often have similarities to event-driven systems But you are right about compile times. Those get worse with templates.