I don't believe I said at any point that printf isn't useful, there's just reasons why you don't use it. Heck, even on the PSP which had a fair amount of horse

I don't believe I said at any point that printf isn't useful, there's just reasons why you don't use it. Heck, even on the PSP which had a fair amount of horsepower console logging was a blocking read and we avoided it unless necessary because it would throw off all sorts of timings(and drive the frame rate in the toilet). In the microcontroller space, 2/3rds of what I'm debugging is cycle timing sensitive. I2C or SPI sequencing and there having a logic analyzer that I can cross-correlate with actual external signals is so much more useful. They've gotten cheap enough these days that it is sometimes just easier to connect one to a spare pin and toggle that pin based in the internal state I want to track.