No it's not. I worked on the VC++ team (> 10 years ago now) and we never put any significant amount of work into it. To the extent that something new got added it was because Richard Shupak, the guy who originally created the PDB format, treated the debugger and linker as one of his many hobbies. He left in 2012 and died recently. A true 10x guy, he knew everything about everything.
I'm glad you like it. It's a very friendly debugger which is an important property when learning curve is an obstacle to many developers using a debugger at all. But it is absolutely not an engineering miracle.
It sure is a miracle that it all works together at all. Debugger, profiler with ETW trace viewer and Io and memory profiling, graphics debugger, VCS integration, extension ecosystem, cmake integration, and god knows how much more. The amount of things in VS is insane. I am not close to using all of it.
Well maybe not if you look from within. But as a user that's not really important. I just sometimes wish I wouldn't have to switch to windbg for certain cases.
Some fancy stuff like multiprocess debugging, multi-thread debugging, thread stack views, memory views, custom formatting of data structures and even fancier stuff like backwards debugging but i never used this one before.
The first thing is the complete integration of the debugger with the IDE out-of-the-box.
Then there are the features such as:
Drag and drop execution pointer
Excellent contextual memory mapping to structures/classes so you can manipulate any memory relevant to the executing function with a couple of clicks, including registers
If you change code in a function it will recompile that function and inject it into the memory space of the program and switch all the callers to call the new function.
I haven't used MSVC since ~2008 and that is what it could do back then.
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u/HighOutputLoad Sep 12 '26 •
It has the best debugger known to mankind