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I'll admit I seldom make use of debuggers. Strangely I feel more productive with good old "printf debugging" than using fancy debuggers. I think it is more ju

I'll admit I seldom make use of debuggers. Strangely I feel more productive with good old "printf debugging" than using fancy debuggers. I think it is more just a habit at this point and has the beauty of working just about everywhere within every toolset, versus learning how to use each language and IDE's debugging functionality.

shortrounddev2 3y ago
The benefit of debuggers is that you can run experiments on your program while it's running. You don't have to stop, add a new print, recompile, re-run, and do whatever steps were required to get to the point of the printf. As you inspect the data, you can further ask more questions of your program without having to start all over again. These days, I refuse to start a new language if there is no debugger or IDE available for it. I did that in C using an Ubuntu server with only vim and makefiles all through college, and I'm never going back to that. I tried web assembly the other day. I couldn't get a decent debugger environment running on it, so I abandoned it.