I know profilers and debuggers are a boon for productivity, but anecdotally I’ve found they’re seldom used. How often do you use debuggers/profilers in your work? What’s preventing you? conversely, what enables you to use them?

  • SwingingKoala@discuss.tchncs.de
    1·
    1 year ago

    I’ve used a debuggers only a handful of times in the last decade or so. The projects I work on have complex stacks, are distributed, etc. The effort to get that to run in a debugger is simply not worth it, logging and testing will do 99.9% of the time. Profiling on the other hand, now that’s useful, especially on prod or under prod load.

  • xian@beehaw.org
    1·
    1 year ago

    As a C# programmer I use the debugger every single day, since it’s so natural and easy to use as to just run the application. I’ve grow spoiled actually, when I program in Go or Rust I really miss the “it just works” debugger.

  • camel-cdr@beehaw.org
    1·
    1 year ago

    I recently started doing xeyes debugging.

    We have so many debug logs that trying to find your log of a background takes a non zero amount of time.

    So just inserting system("xeyes"); is actually way easier, to get instant feedback, and you can just use system("xmessage msg"), if you need a message.

  • JesterXIII@kbin.social
    1·
    1 year ago

    I used to just use print statements and avoided debuggers because I didn’t understand it. But as I’ve gotten more experienced, it’s become my first choice in debugging now (go figure haha).

  • cnk@kbin.dk
    1·
    1 year ago

    I have a tendency to just use console logging, and only use debuggers when things are starting to get hairy.

    • pinkpatrol@anarch.isOP
      1·
      1 year ago

      How do people do stuff without debuggers? :D

      Another way to develop would be through iterating within a Unit Test that you don’t plan to keep around.

      Uh, I set a breakpoint and run the app?

      To add a bit more context, it’s more difficult to configure a debugger when the application is running within something like Docker. How difficult? That depends on the language and tools you’re using.

      • Nicktar@beehaw.org
        1·
        1 year ago

        I’ve seen the fun of “prints everywhere” in production when a colleague forgot to remove a “Why the fuck do you end up here?” followed by a bunch of variables before committing a hot-fix… Customers weren’t to amused…

        Edit: That was a PHP driven web shop and the message ended up on to of the checkout page