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A valid definition of retarded: debugging by using your brain to simulate a machine executing your code, and then printing variables to the console to validate your assumptions.

This is why tools like GDB exist.

mleku 2y ago

debugging concurrent code with microsecond intervals between events makes debuggers worthless. printing logs is the only way to get something to post mortem this kind of code.

when i write code it's either too short if it's linear and too parallel, concurrent and time-dependent if it's not linear.

concurrent solutions can do a lot of things that you can't do with long winded single threads. number one thing is extremely low latency responses. parallel throughput tends to just be simple single threads and usually barely needs debugging.

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Discussion

gsovereignty 2y ago

Debuggers are way more efficient at manipulating points to print variables etc though.

You can also do profiling and see which threads/mutexes/functions are introducing problems and then step through those with a debgugger.

mleku 2y ago

doesn't work in a sub-100ms timescale.

when someone makes a debugger that makes this kind of state inspection post mortem i'll be using it. it's simply impractical for especially low latency network protocols, the debugger assumes linearity and single threaded execution. even the Go debugger, delve is like this, despite most Go code being highly concurrent and parallel and time sensitive.

mleku 2y ago

it's not just the inspection though, because very often timeouts are too short to tolerate the general slowdown of having compiled it to be debugged.

gsovereignty 2y ago

Yeah, valid point, I always have to use a workaround for network calls etc