←back to thread

376 points turrini | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.209s | source
Show context
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.

replies(13): >>42147055 #>>42147066 #>>42147101 #>>42147176 #>>42147333 #>>42147405 #>>42147537 #>>42147789 #>>42147794 #>>42148121 #>>42148413 #>>42149115 #>>42152454 #
1. crossroadsguy ◴[] No.42147794[source]
Sometimes I have had much better results with adding logs especially if an issue doesn't occur always and I am not so sure about the steps either because breakpoints take a lot of time as well. Also, in some cases (esp. mobile UI) breakpoints might actually break the flow and you might not get a proper flow. But yeah mastering the debugger is indeed a must and a GUI debugger is better than a CLI debugger. It's just that at least for me personally logging is first line of debugging :|