I use both, they have different purposes. I find printf-style debugging to be much faster for bisecting the control flow, and the vast majority of bugs I see ar

I use both, they have different purposes. I find printf-style debugging to be much faster for bisecting the control flow, and the vast majority of bugs I see are of this type. Debuggers tend to be more useful in cases of corrupted state that isn't the result of broken control flow logic. These are much rarer, usually the product of something like broken bit-twiddling logic. And these days that kind of code is rarely written manually. When I write a non-trivial data container, I usually provide a standard public method that does a deep inspection of the integrity and consistency of the internal state. These are much too expensive to use as a typical assertion, but turning this on usually isolates the problem so well that a debugger isn't required to figure out what went wrong. I used to use debuggers a lot more than I do now because the nature of the typical bug has changed. The types of bugs are also much less diverse than they used to be.