Learning to Use the Debugger

05/06/15

There's this slightly embarassing fact that becomes more embarassing the longer I'm a computer engineer.

I barely know how to use debuggers. Like, I'm aware of them and have used them, but they have never become my go-to tool. I still mostly resort to print lines if I don't understand the problem well enough to fix it after seeing it in action.

My excuse had been that I'd been working in a multi-process (which I found out I erronously called mutli-threaded) environment, but I recently was told that gdb can work quite well in either multi-process or multi-threaded envrionments. In fact, it's pretty powerful in those environments, which is all the more reason to learn to use the tool.

So I guess the best way to start is to make it my main debugging tool from now on. When easily appliable, at least, I still need to figure out how to do it for some work setups, and so I'll use my old methods whilst I learn the new ones.

It's also an excuse to properly learn the javascript debugger.