On Wed, 2008-06-04 at 07:20 -0700, Dan Nicholson wrote: > On Wed, Jun 4, 2008 at 5:35 AM, john q public <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > wrote: > > My REAL question is does anyone have advice on when its better to > > comb the source versus chasing problems with the debugger? > > I believe that Mr. Torvalds thinks debuggers are almost always the > wrong thing and a waste of time vs. just thinking about the source. > But everyone has their preference. I personally don't know gdb that > well, so it's usually is faster for me to debug problems by reading > the code.
Varies with the bug. If I already have a fairly good idea what kind of problem it is, reading code is usually enough. More commonly though, I just know that the output of some big block of code is incorrect, and that's where a good debugger helps follow the inputs, making it easier to spot when some intermediary value looks wrong. Sure, you can theoretically do all the computations in your head. But really, if you've got good tools, why not let them do the hard part for you? Note - my coding is mostly in Java, using the excellent debugger built into the Eclipse IDE. I don't have very much experience of using gdb... Simon.
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