Hacker News Reader

Comment by ozim | Hacker News Reader

Debuggers are much better in JetBrains or Visual Studio than using just an editor.

Had you honestly imagined that Emacs doesn't have excellent debugging tools?

No it doesn't, unless it magically got them since XEmacs, with someone taking the effort to duplicate all features in ELisp.

Running gdb as subprocess, with breakpoints, step, run, continue, is the basic stuff.

It has. GUD is pretty good. Emacs itself has improved vastly since XEmacs was popular.

Looks pretty much the same from the docs.

Recently been using emacs' inbuilt debugger. Honestly it is nuts, how good it is.

Now try to visually display all the threads being executed and the dependency graph who launched each thread.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/debugger/usin...

Followed by doing some code change and hot reloading it into the debugging session.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/debugger/edit...

While using binaries compiled in release build by default,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnbO140OXuI

All of it in C++.

Can it be done using standalone debuggers? I don't mind switching between a text editor and a debugger

I imagine that just way more work was poured into VS/Jetbrains debuggers and that they have better UX and better features.

I don’t have to offer my soul to make it work just pay money ;)

> I imagine that just way more work was poured into VS/Jetbrains debuggers

I'm fascinated at how vastly different our perspectives are. From my POV, I'd be shocked if VS/Jetbrains had a fraction of the work poured into them that Emacs or Vim have.

VS and JetBrains IDEs have very good sane defaults. They're usable out of the box. In VS I load a .sln file, or a project containing CMakeLists.txt, press F5, and I am debugging with a full-fledged data structure visualisation, CPU and heap profiling, and I can even add in time-travel debugging with a couple of clicks.

I have to manually set all of this up in Vim or Emacs, and frankly the debugging experience in GDB or LLDB is worse than it really ought to be. People actually need to use good tools to understand how nice things can be.

Try to debug a CMake file, do hot code reloading for C++, or debug release binaries with Emacs/vim.

Just three examples out of many others.

I think you need to try the Jetbrains debugger first - anyone who has used it would never compare it with neovim or emacs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com