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printf debugging always have a place, but for some reason, I found the debugging experience to be worse than 20 years ago. Tools like Visual Studio still have g
by GuB-42 6y ago
printf debugging always have a place, but for some reason, I found the debugging experience to be worse than 20 years ago. Tools like Visual Studio still have great debuggers, but I didn't notice significant improvement since the early days, and newer toolchains are worse.
A couple of years ago, I had to maintain a bit of Java code using Eclipse. That is, the old IDE everyone loves to hate. And while some of that hate is well deserved, for debugging, it was the most pleasant experience I had in a long time. Nice object inspector, edit-and-continue, conditional breakpoints, and step-by-step that works. Much better than fumbling around with GDB or one of its less-than-perfect UIs.
Also note that printf debugging and the step-by-step and breakpoint kind are not mutually exclusive. With an edit-and-continue feature, you can get the best of both worlds, but that's not something common these days, unfortunately.
- vvanders 6y agoMaybe it was because I was exposed to it early in my career but I have yet to find anything that rivals Visual Studio debugging, either from a "just works" perspective or ability to deep-dive into gnarly memory corruption(memory windows, robust watch windows and data breakpoints).