Personally the biggest obstacle of using a debugger is that it cannot be automated easily. You have to be present when it's triggered. You have to navigate it m

Personally the biggest obstacle of using a debugger is that it cannot be automated easily. You have to be present when it's triggered. You have to navigate it manually. When the program crashes again, you have to repeat the process. I know some debuggers can be automated but then you'll have to debug the debugger script. Logging is much nicer because you can turn the exploration process into a text analysis problem. Logs can be searched, stored and compared. For me, sifting the log is much easier. Whenever I try to write a medium-sized program for a serious kind of purpose, the first thing I do is to set up a nice and reliable logging system. This is the decision that you won't regret for the rest of development. I would argue that the use case of a debugger is much narrower than logging/printf debugging.