With current gdb (i.e. released this decade), you can define pretty-printers in Python that are loaded automatically and print whatever you think is most import

With current gdb (i.e. released this decade), you can define pretty-printers in Python that are loaded automatically and print whatever you think is most important for a given type; the "print /r" command is available to print the raw details when necessary. libstdc++ ships with pretty-printers for its types. But I agree that printf debugging still has its uses.