this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2026
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You can take away my auto complete, performance monitoring and all that jazz but you can't tell me a debugging system isn't absolutely essential if you actually want to finish a project in a reasonable amount of time
Why debugger when print?
Embedded systems 😁
That’s what a single red LED is for, right?
Is the single red LED solid, or is it flashing Morse for "please kill me"?
Because I don’t hate myself
javascript moment
Most text editors like vim/emacs/ect have ways of using a debugger.
I remember vim being a bit involved, but the performance was awesome.
But then if you put enough bells and whistles on text editors, do they become an ide?
Yes
9000 IQ programmer starts every project rolling their own debugger instead of dedicating 8GB of RAM to vscode
It depends on what you do, but generally I can't argue against a debugger.
gdb works great without an IDE, and many text editors have autocomplete.
I think you are not looking at the full picture - there are developments (arguably everything back-end) where a debugging system is absolutely not essential and in many cases (multithreading) outright useless for some types of bugs.
Feel free to not use a debugger for your software. But I don’t hate myself so I’m going to stick to using one whenever possible.
Saying it is not essential and saying it is generally useless are two very different things.
I believe that is a vast minority of developments. And tbh multithreading debugging is a breeze in C# on Rider (except race conditions, those will always be tricky, but also easily identifiable).
And I believe you are very wrong in that belief. However, a reliable statistic is not the first search result that I can find, so we'll have to disregard the disagreement on that point. You lost me at your C# multithreading reasoning though. A debugger will always interfere with the processes you are looking at, hence making debugging of multithreading-related errors a game of whack-a-mole.
It's a very pleasant debugging experience when you can easily switch threads, have them log what happened first, check the variables in the thread at the moment in time it was hit (vs now), etc. etc.
Most concurrency problems disappear at the pace of a debugger.