I think it is fair that my comment was clearly all encompassing where it should not have been. I am curious on the numbers, though. Just anecdotally, I have seen very few people use a step debugger.

Some of it may be situational. With how many microservices I'm dealing with, "stepping into" a call really needs to jump to another process quite often.

Anyone have numbers, by chance, on how many folks actually use a lot of these features?

Visual Studio also does remote debugging, including for services running on Azure, and recently introduced across containers.

Usually the problema is that many developers never learned what a visual debugger is capable of, and the typical command line interface in UNIX leaves little room for exploration if people aren't curious to learn about them.

For example, many aren't aware that gdb has a TUI that eases the experience.

I know you can do remote debugging. I mean the case where you have a breakpoint in one service, and it calls to another service. You can't really "step into" that. Best you can do is connect to both services and have cooperating breakpoints.

But, really, this is something I've never actually done. Reasoning about how the system should behave has been enough to get me by.

A scenario I have used it a lot was in debugging cooperating processes in UNIX, a couple of years ago.

When some condition took place, the problematic process would break into the debugger, while the others would be parked waiting for me to attach to them.