I program in C very reluctantly. I don’t hate the language, but it occupies a curious niche between assembly language (where you can do absolutely anything, if you’re willing to write it yourself, and eval is trivial) and a true high level language (where you can do absolutely anything, you don’t have to write it yourself, and eval is available for everything else). Yet it’s ubiquitous, it has a lot of libraries, and it’s probably the best way to write reasonably efficient code that has to run on plenty of platforms.
Because I’m writing a lot more C code lately (and of that, finding and fixing a lot of bugs), I’ve spent a lot of time using the GNU debugger GDB.
As a reluctant programmer in general, I spent many years happily debugging with print statements, and then plenty of years debugging with comprehensive test cases. When you’re writing a virtual machine and your test cases are all in a high level language, you don’t always have that luxury, especially when you have segfaults.
I already knew the value of backtraces, breakpoints, and printing the value of local variables. Then I forced myself to learn a few more tricks to make the most of the debugger. For example, breakpoints can take conditions. That is, you can write break src/exceptions.c:59 if exception->type == exception_class_NULLACCESS. Learning that alone paid off several times over.
The other feature I forget after a couple of months away from marathon debugging sessions is that p can dereference a pointer to a struct. That is, if you have a Coord pointer in the variable coords, use p *coords to see a serialized version of the struct and its contents. Handy!
I could talk more about using up and down to walk up and down the call stack after a breakpoint, but even learning only three or four useful commands has already cut out hours of debugging time in the past month. (I even found myself wishing for a better debugger in one of the HLLs I was working on.)
Thanks to all of the contributors to GNU GDB and its ecosystem; you’ve made it easier for me to write further free software.
A couple of years ago my hippy father in law gave our young son a kids' book called "Thank You Sun, Thank You Moon" which was full of thank yous to all sorts of things (thank you water, thank you birds - you get the picture), and every time I see an entry in this series of yours it makes me think of that.
Don't get me wrong, I understand what you're trying to do - there's precious little appreciation of good work in our world - but it does always give me a little chuckle.
Ever tried debugging Visual studio!
Then do yourself a favor and try it with DDD
http://www.gnu.org/software/ddd/
Being lazy, reluctant to read documentation, I still figured out how to make a breakpoint (double click on the line), watch and examine a variable / structure, or backtrack the function calls after a core dump.
To me, using a debugger without a graphical font end, is like writing machine code instead of C.
Following on from DDD, use Delta Debugging. They've the same author IIRC.
GDB is probably the life saving took for all C programmers. The more you talk the less it is. All for free. I am a huge fan of free-software and intent to write more about them in my blogs. Interesting I have an article on GDB now at my blog.