Re:Things I Don’t Know as of 2018
by hamburglar on Thursday November 26, 2020 @05:40PM
(#25224068)
I rarely use the debugger in highly async systems (e.g. node) because it's just a mess, but in C/C++/Go/Java where there actually are good debuggers and you tend to have chunks (e.g. entire functions) of synchronous code, I find it very, very helpful to step line-by-line through most nontrivial code at least once for any major code path. A long time ago, I had a sort-of mentor who, whenever he looked at new code, asked the author "have you single-stepped through it yet?" so I did it to humor him, but the number of times I caught errors was eye-opening, so to this day I still like to do it.
I don't want to claim this is superior to printf debugging, or whatever other technique. I just like seeing the code executing, and debugging some weird error can sometimes be an almost relaxing activity, as you just step through the code one by one and try to keep track of what's happening without needing to think more than 2 or 3 steps ahead.
That said, I'm also the guy who will happily put breakpoints into internal framework code (e.g. Spring Boot) so that I can understand why the framework doesn't do what it's supposed to do. Usually, I find the answer, although maybe in some cases it would have been more economical to use a workaround instead, but that would leave me dissatisfied...