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Comment by jpollock | Hacker News Reader

Whenever I use print for debugging I end up running the code many, many times. Each time I add another print statement. "Here1", "Here2", "Here3 %s %s %s"...

If I break out the debugger, I run the code once.

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Unfortunately, not all languages/systems have an efficient and useful debugger. This becomes especially true when multiple stacks are involved. But the print statement remains possible across almost all tools, technologies and systems

Agree.

Another use case for printf debugging is occasional or transient issues where there is a bug, but it only presents in an aggregate of many runs (or a lot of runtime).

I debug scientific simulations in this way with printf's, because I need to look across 100 log files to find 2 or 3 instances of a bug.

Then I can reproduce it and zoom in on the exact problem with either more logging or a debugger.

I think it's just that people have anxiety/aren't very used to debuggers so print is less stressful even though in reality it takes 10 times more

The very first thing I do when setting up any new dev environment is trying to attach a debugger to my local build

It’s setup time that pays dividends for years afterwards.

I think many folk don’t bother until they need to fix a bug and at that point you are in a sunk cost situation.

Unless you decide you needed a breakpoint in the past.

...and you're not on Linux, because on Linux we have rr! https://rr-project.org/

(I still use print statements 99.99% of the time though)

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