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376 points turrini | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.199s | source
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rkharsan64 ◴[] No.42146864[source]
On a general note, I would recommend any new (and experienced!) programmers to master the debugging tools of their ecosystem. I've seen countless experienced developers use printf-based debugging and waste hourse debugging something which could've been easily figured out by setting a breakpoint and stepping through your code. This is also a good way to understand code you're unfamiliar with.

This is one area where I believe a GUI tool is so much better: I can hover over variable names to view their values, expand and collapse parts of a nested structure, edit values easily, and follow execution in the same environment I write my code in.

Sure, it doesn't help much for some scenarios (one I've heard people mention is multithreaded code, where logs are better?), but for most people it's not that far from a superpower.

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1. bobmcnamara ◴[] No.42147537[source]
At least in embedded, often the tools suck.

Some ancient version of NetBeans leaking ram like a sieve until it brings down the machine, or a decade old version of Eclipse that can't pull in a newer CDT, running on a fork of OpenOCD with nothing customized for the CPU architecture running dog slow.

Sadly, it can be faster to reserve a GPIO, bitbang a TX-only UART, and get on with it.