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It's quite interesting to me the way that different "programming cultures" exist around debuggers.

If you grew up doing windows C++ development, looking at things in a debugger is your first step. You only resort to printing values if you can't immediately see what happened in the debugger.

A lot of other envioronment/language cultures are the opposite. Obviously both have their place, but I do feel like more people should use the debugger as the first step instead of the last.



For embedded applications, especially robotics, it tends not to be a great default because it stops the process, which tends to be bad for realtime control loops. That said, a complete hang is the situation where I absolutely would try to get a debugger attached and get a backtrace as one of the first things to try.


If you’re working in robotics and don’t have fully deterministic event based replay you need to find a new middleware.


I print first and get a feel for the code... Debuggers always slowed me down, and yes this was for c++




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