I try to use a debugger whenever I can. Unfortunately, I develop on Linux, so the debugger situation here is awful. Basically almost all debuggers are based on gdb or lldb in true Unix fashion parsing text to generate a GUI... They tend to break really fast IME, since text doesn't provide good stability/reliability guarantees (no type checking, no nothing) and even when they do work, there is a lot of visual delay in the feedback loop, which makes them a pain to use.
Another problem is that often the debug builds of things at work run too slow to be practical, or they're too big to fit on the target device. My use of debugger at work usually boils down to getting and translating stack traces from core dumps we receive (on command line). There is a very rare occasion that I can do something on my local machine and then I use a debugger. Life is too short for 15-45 minute add logs + compile cycles. I also use bpftrace whenever I can.
At home I write Rust, but IME templates don't play well with the debugger, so I usually fall back on prints and bpftrace again.
But generally I'm convinced that using debuggers could be a big productivity boost. Here[1] you can see a demonstration of how smooth working with a debugger can be, in this case it's RemedyBG. But forget about this level of comfort on Linux. The whole video may be also worth watching if you like rants and want to see how Visual Studio debugger quality dipped over the years (first the current VS debugger is shown, and then an old version (from VS6 IIRC)).
Another problem is that often the debug builds of things at work run too slow to be practical, or they're too big to fit on the target device. My use of debugger at work usually boils down to getting and translating stack traces from core dumps we receive (on command line). There is a very rare occasion that I can do something on my local machine and then I use a debugger. Life is too short for 15-45 minute add logs + compile cycles. I also use bpftrace whenever I can.
At home I write Rust, but IME templates don't play well with the debugger, so I usually fall back on prints and bpftrace again.
But generally I'm convinced that using debuggers could be a big productivity boost. Here[1] you can see a demonstration of how smooth working with a debugger can be, in this case it's RemedyBG. But forget about this level of comfort on Linux. The whole video may be also worth watching if you like rants and want to see how Visual Studio debugger quality dipped over the years (first the current VS debugger is shown, and then an old version (from VS6 IIRC)).
[1]: <https://youtu.be/GC-0tCy4P1U?t=1845>