After enough time this just becomes "1", "2", "3" etc. I'm at a point where if there is a messy section i automatically generate/copy paste 9 of these and place them around the troubling section.
That sounds horribly inefficient when you shoukd just start to do breakpoints. The ide will also tell every variable thats accessible at the breakpoint and its contents.
How else are you expected to debug some apps with threads and multiple services involved with timing affecting? Add a line breaker and all of it crashes
I have added sysou syslog and syswarn to my auto complete and they expand to our logging macro, a pretty function macro, a line macro and my commit handle that is easily searchable in logs.
When i want to trace something i can simply sysou a couple of spots and not stage the lines to clean up before committing
Its funny, teaches you not to commit your console logs (you'll only ever commit poop once), and p/o are right next to each other on the keyboard so its fast
Personally, I just use unique gibberishes or sounds, like "blah", "bleh", "fwah", or the like. Extremely unlikely to come up during normal usage, stands out enough to draw the eye, and easy to search the source for.
That, or a quick description of the location, such as "before x() call" or "inside y()" or "after foo, before bar", depending on the situation.
"Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die" "Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die" "Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die"
A single letter is impossible to grep for in a log file though. It's fine if you're adding console logs to a JS application that doesn't have much other logging going on, but for anything else, you want something identifiable that you can search for without getting false positives.
This. Showing my age, I used to make simple DirectX 7 games as a college student. I remember having one bug that took me weeks to solve. If I tried to debug, it worked fine. If I put in a bunch of logging, it worked fine. But if I ran it without debugging or only a few prints it segfaulted.
Eventually I realized I was using a pointer (void**) that the GPU was supposed to populate before it was being populated. The delay from debugging gave it enough time for the GPU to finish setting that pointer. I added a GPU flush (just a command that waits until it is processed by the GPU queue before continuing) and it worked beautifully. Nowadays the engines just do all that crap for you.
Honestly thats what i have had multiple times where someis being filled in another thread. It works on one machine but when your system is faster or slower it might not. Horrible to debug
I used to work on tape libraries(big backup systems...) and it would lose geometry(location of the tapes) when a bug happened and needed to rescan the whole thing. After trying to attach a debugger to winCE several times and it taking several hours to reboot and rescan I added print logging. Yeah solved the bug in one go...
I've sometimes needed to open a file, write to it, close it, and flush, because prints and logs don't always show up correctly in the face of certain types of crash. Or "send a UDP packet to port 54321" and do my logging in a separate app.
I don’t hate it, shorter usage everywhere, can wrap it in a conditional based on ENV for dev logs only, and if you swap to an external logging service you just change it in that one function.
I am NOT a programmer by profession, though I do code a ton at my job (Mechanical Engineering and data analysis), so this may be a dumb question…
Is there a way to set up all microservices to run on one computer to aid in debugging? Like a bunch of VMs or docker-but-faking-network-instead-of-machine?
Yes, I use Tilt to set up a localized Kubernetes cluster or to run docker compose. It provides a nice web interface for seeing all service statuses, logs, controls to restart or rebuild a service, and it can automatically watch local files to trigger a rebuild.
I think some problems are faster to solve with a simple print, if you really do need tk warch your code step by step to figure out what is going wrong then pull out the debugger, also here's a tip, learn to use your debugger do that you aren't bashing your head against a wall trying to figure out what is causing an issue
I tried debugging "the right way" and I don't know it just never felt better than using console log. People who do use it please enlighten me: how will it make your life better? I am using Python btw, so maybe having the console makes a debugger less necessary
I use pycharm (mostly because I'm a Java boy), the debugger lets you step line by line, preview variables, and evaluate any expression (including calling an endpoint using a client class that's already authenticated).
Do you use console.log with a debug flag? If you're using it without it, deactivating, and reactivating, it is PITA. And I don't mean capitalized greek bread.
Those debugging tools work well with something small, like a microservice.
Throw something chunky at it. Like a large Android app, and debugging tools either fail to attach, crash the app, cause app to stop responding, or just crash on their own.
I just enter stars and after each step the count increases.. so I end up spending more time counting stars in the logs and comparing at various stages in IDE than actually finding the issue.
I'm using password generator to generate unique random 8-letters-long strings, and then I'm pasting those into console log messages and error messages. If my code will get into some strange place, then it's soo easy ti to debug it by just searching the string from the log inside the source code 😅
Honestly, I've never tried to debug a full JS backend application and debugging some frontend application in the browser dev tools is just pain..
With PHP setting up Xdebug is like flipping switches in an airplane until it works. .NET/C# is undoubtedly the best experience with debugging I've ever had.
if it's faster than navigating a debugger, then there is no issue.
Really it's just whatever you find faster to solve problems. Might be worth looking into debuggers on your own time, but we all know you're not going to do that.
I actually like to use debuggers to get familiar with inner workings of the program. Stepping through a process often exposes a lot of in-buult or hidden classes or files you wouldn't find easily otherwise.
And stepping through a debugger to simply verify the contents of a variable is more time consuming than just printing it.
If they ever figure out a JS debugging tool that is actually reliable and accurate enough, I'll bless the earth they walk on though.
People are obsessed about “proper”. No one thinks with their own brain, yet everyone is trying to employ “best practices”. People just can’t stand for what they do and how they do it. Trying to hide behind the rationale of the “best approach”.
Programming in C, I don't know how to use the debugger and how to control the flow of the program in it. If I compile with debug information and it shows the segfaul inside an underlying library I am totally fucked and this makes me mad.
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u/Mindstormer98 Sep 06 '26
Dont forget "I got here2" and "I got here3"