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Comment by enneff | Hacker News Reader

How many people use debuggers like GDB day-to-day? I've found them useful when trapped in a corner, but typically I debug with the source in hand.

Anyone got any good debugging war stories?

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I would assert that it is pure folly to attempt to build a non-trivial application in a compiled language without the assistance of a competent debugger. You simply cannot iterate quickly enough through the debugging loop of "Form theory" -> "Test theory" if you have to wait a minute for a build to complete each time. Unit tests help, but will never get you all the way there (good luck tracking down a leak with unit tests).

the repl is your friend even in compiled languages like haskell.

A proper REPL can do a lot of the same stuff you'd use a debugger for, and a whole lot more. With a nice REPL you'll do just fine without a debugger.

Why not use a REPL and a good debugger? It's a nice combination.

I consider myself a "competent debugger". ;-)

But more seriously: one of Go's selling points is fast compilation times. Even for large projects compilation is mostly I/O bound, which typically means sub-second compiles.

The Plan9 debugger, ACID is awesome, even in Unix.

http://swtch.com/plan9port/man/man1/acid.html

You can debug a kernel on a remote machine with a different architecture.

Shame that we've got to go back to the dark ages of GDB for Go.

We have plans to build a more fully-featured, Go-centric compiler (and there's the beginnings of one in the source tree under pkg/exp/ogle), but we haven't had the time to get stuck into it yet.

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