Seer: A GUI front end to GDB for Linux

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.

I would add to that that in most scenarios where people think debugging doesn't help or won't work - it can.

Running inside Docker, multithreaded, multiprocessed, all can be debugged with a little effort. Most often much less effort that repeatedly printf debugging.

I am not sure I understand your point. Can you be more explicit ?

People who think that case X cannot be debugged without printf often don't know the features of their debugger. I.e. look at several of the comments which seem to miss that you can:

- Remote debug.

- Use conditional breakpoints.

- Use breakpoints to trigger commands, e.g. log values, enable other breakpoints, etc. instead of stopping. execution.

- Debug multi-threaded code.

- Disassemble a fragment.