alt Hacker NewsI can say up until 2005 or so I was a real believer in printf() debugging but I deliberately switched to using a debugger as much as possible around that time. I found that no matter how hard people "try" if they modifying the code to do debugging there is some chance these get checked in -- whereas you can investigate many things with the debugger without checking anything it.
Some applications have more trouble with setup and teardown than others. Like I knew a professor who kept sending me C programs that would crash before main() and some systems have a lot of trouble with "crash on shutdown" which might be a problem (corrupted files) or a non-problem.
Replies
> I was a real believer in printf() debugging but I deliberately switched to using a debugger
This really does not need to be an either/or. They have different uses. You can stick in 20 printfs and get a quick feel for where the bug is far quicker than stepping through the code - especially if you set a breakpoint and hit run, only to realise that you've overshot. You can run the program 10 times with different parameters and compare the results with printf much more easily than you could with a debugger. But, once you've found the rough area, a debugger is much better for fine grained inspection, and especially interrogating state with carefully written watches.
I do get your point about the risk of leaving in some trace by accident. But it feels like overkill to throw away such a valuable tool just because of that.
We still seem to have fairly bad tooling for advanced debugging use cases.
There's no good reason you shouldn't be able to have an IDE maintain a text overlay of debugging points which is solely supplied as breakpoint scripts to the debugger instead.
IDEs seem to conk out at click to set breakpoint.
Just make it fprintf(stderr, ...) debugging instead.