How do you use debuggers?

I’ve been coding fortran, C++, python and Julia (a little) for 20 years. I think I can count on one hand the number of times I used a debugger, which were all critical memory access issues in C++. These I now avoid with the tooling provided by clang (and recent gcc). I more or less follow the approach of @juliohm and @ChrisRackauckas

I suppose it depends on what environment you learned in. I have only ever used Vim and the command line, so I didn’t get used to the idea of immediate debugging. I spent a few afternoons coding c# in visual studio and noticed how it just drops you into the debugger on error. In that case I see how easy it is to get used to. Whereas I always just have to get myself inside the mind of the machine.

But as so many people are coming from Matlab I can appreciate the desire to get a good debugger for Julia. The one time I played with it, Gallium seemed to do all that was needed, so it doesn’t seem to far off to have this to everyone’s satisfaction.

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