I’ve had so many problems where step debugging was utterly useless, printf debugging is very powerful. https://twitter.com/amasad/status/1380559800598077440

now i feel bad for QT’ing this bc it’s a fucking ad

“why don’t you use <complex overengineered tool>” because the simple tool gets the job done and is actually more versatile?

many such cases

i find that step debugging is most useful for code i *didn’t* write, where i would have to do a lot of guesswork which ones are the relevant code paths, which is usually mostly obvious with code i wrote

with printf debugging if you know that one particular loop is going wrong you can put a printf into the loop and then see at a glance what’s happening at each iteration

with step debugging that’s a lot of clicking!

step debugging becomes massively less useful when the debugger can’t concisely show the relevant data structures, printf debugging wins bc you can just write your own routines to show the relevant data!

so code in languages like javascript where the central data structure might be a short array of objects or something is nice with a step debugger but things like C code where everything is some custom spin on a linked list or stored in separate arrays is absolutely hopeless