Oddly enough I probably use a debugger for my C and C++ code less than for something like Julia or Matlab. Usually if I’m rendering HPC operations into C, the algorithm has already been thoroughly vetted in a higher level language, or I’m implementing a known algorithm from a paper or text book. C in this case is simply giving me a performance enhancement.
Just thinking out loud, but I also tend to write a lot more test code for C. This approach simply doesn’t work as well for general algorithm development because it’s too hard to predict the vagaries of real data in advance.