The nice thing about printf debug is the preemptive debugging. You can leave them in the source as conditional comments, and it makes the code self documenting

The nice thing about printf debug is the preemptive debugging. You can leave them in the source as conditional comments, and it makes the code self documenting at runtime. I find it useful as a pre-source review step reopening a project after a few years. Documentation at runtime gives a faster mental map of the execution then reviewing the source without seeing the runtime debug flow. So my debug builds often self document at runtime, and in production the printfs become comments.