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Comment by grlass | Hacker News Reader

I started software dev in the mid-2010s, and had never heard of Borland, until I heard a former colleague mention it having great built-in debugging tools and that they missed it.

Same colleague had some vocal criticism of `gdb` as a debugging tool, and the state of Linux-based debugging tools as a whole, with claims that "Borland's were much better, and Visual Studio (not VS Code) being one of the few development environments with a quality debugger".

I'm not sure how fair that assessment is, I've found `gdb` to be a helpful tool, though I've never used Visual Studio.

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I'd say Delphi was one notch better than Visual Studio. The pascal language was more highly optimized and easier to parse, so the debugger was much snappier about popping up the tooltips to show you values of variables or F1 to jump into the help pages. I remember being especially disappointed with VS because they would spend hundreds of MB of your precious disk space installing the entire Microsoft Knowledge Base, and the hitting F1 on a code statement would bring up a mishmash of Visual Basic examples (while developing C++) for almost but not the right class. In Delphi, it always knew exactly what class you were dealing with and would open the correct help page before your finger was fully off of the function key. The help pages had been expertly written to show you the most important details first, and were easy to browse. Really, I'm surprised I don't see more people reminiscing about those help files. There was probably as much effort put into that as into the frameworks or compiler or IDE.

Agreed. The help pages were really top notch. Other software's help pages were basically useless to the point that no one read them. In Delphi not only you had to the point explanations but also examples that frequently solved the problem one had in the first place. Sadly, as someone pointed out, most of this art seems to be forgotten with time.

You could say the only fault with those help pages is that they were too good: Some time after v. 5 they stopped including those lovely paper manuals, probably because they figured the help pages were good enough to replace them.

You should try the Visual Studio debugger one day. It's kinda the yardstick for graphical debuggers.

gdb is a fine tool, but I think the VS debugger is reasonably described as "next level".

Many people don't know about Microsoft's other debugger, WinDbg. It's actually more capable than the VS debugger, but the UI is closer to that of gdb.

I would be keen to try, but afaik there's no way to do it on Linux which is my main dev/deploy environment.

It feels like Linux debugging is stuck in a viscous cycle, since few people are putting the capital into a decent debugger UI, and thus few people are using debugging UIs (and thus using printf debugging, or gdb CLI). Folk might not realise how much better it could be.

It’s night and day. The debuggers in those two tools were very easy to use, very visual, but surprisingly powerful.

I cry a little on the inside when I see developers using Visual Studio and resorting to printf statements (or the equivalent) because they’ve never even tried to use the debugger, ever.

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