If you’re like many developers and you generally use println for debugging and rarely or never use an actual debugger, then this is wasted time.
I weep for the time lost on debugging with println. Good grief. It’s like having access to a time stopping ability and going “nah, I like trying to add a marker and tracing footsteps”.
Yes, for multi threaded workloads there aren’t many options, but most are single threaded and eschewing a debugger is bonkers to me.
I have to admit I still readily reach for dbg! to narrow down where the problem is happening (instead of endlessly stepping through), especially in async. But when I do I put in one or two a function and upto one an await. Then I make a breakpoint before that and debug if I didn’t find it by just a short look.
This is always one of the first things I setup on a project and teach or encourage my teams to do… I’m always surprised how many devs would rather use print statements all the time (not just in Rust, but especially JS/TS) when it only takes like 5 minutes to configure the debugger. Maybe 10 minutes if you need to search how to open the debugging port in Chrome/FF.
I weep for the time lost on debugging with println. Good grief. It’s like having access to a time stopping ability and going “nah, I like trying to add a marker and tracing footsteps”.
Yes, for multi threaded workloads there aren’t many options, but most are single threaded and eschewing a debugger is bonkers to me.
Anti Commercial-AI license
I have to admit I still readily reach for dbg! to narrow down where the problem is happening (instead of endlessly stepping through), especially in async. But when I do I put in one or two a function and upto one an await. Then I make a breakpoint before that and debug if I didn’t find it by just a short look.
Anyone who actually writes Rust code knows about tracing my friend.
We also have the ever useful
#[track_caller]/Location::caller().And it’s needless to say that dbg!() also exists, which is better than manual printing for quick debugging.
So there exists a range of options setting between simple printing, and having to resort to using gdb/lldb (possibly with rr).
But yes, skipping debugging symbols was a bad suggestion.
This is always one of the first things I setup on a project and teach or encourage my teams to do… I’m always surprised how many devs would rather use print statements all the time (not just in Rust, but especially JS/TS) when it only takes like 5 minutes to configure the debugger. Maybe 10 minutes if you need to search how to open the debugging port in Chrome/FF.