4 ms·
There's no shame in it but that doesn't mean that it's the best or most efficient way of doing things. I've found that stepping through code in a debugger at a
by RX14 10y ago
There's no shame in it but that doesn't mean that it's the best or most efficient way of doing things.
I've found that stepping through code in a debugger at a human pace, and getting to really understand what's happening when a bug occurs is invaluable.
- MichaelBurge 10y agoOne problem with this, is that your code often ends up in a state where only step-through debugging works anymore. It might become too complex to reason about just looking at the code, from the types alone, or by printing data. Same problem happens with other methods too: If you develop solely with unit and integration tests, it might actually be quite difficult to get a step-through debugger set up to debug your application. I worked at a company where I was the only one who used a step-through debugger, and some uses of compile-time metaprogramming would frequently break the debugger. And if you use multiple techniques as appropriate(unit tests, printf or equivalent, step-through debugging), it's generally easy to use any of them as appropriate.
- greglindahl 10y agoLike every other tool in programming, different people have different preferences and experiences. Symbolic debuggers have always ended up being a waste of my time, but I don't try to extrapolate from there to everyone else's preferences.
- reddit_clone 10y agoI don't trust debuggers with multi-threaded programs. Organized (multi verbose level) tracing built right into the application can go a long way before you actually need a debugger.