Bizarre that a programming language designed by non first time language designers, backed by a multi-billion dollar company and used extensively throughout that company(by "new" engineers), doesn't have a world class debug story.
— Brian W. Kernighan, in the paper Unix for Beginners (1979)Having a debugger available does not drop your IQ by 20 points.
Not necessarily, but it can have that effect. Sometimes I spend a long time in the debugger, following the chain from effects to causes to the causes’ causes and so on, getting a little dopamine hit every time I uncover a new level – it’s exciting, like watching a detective show – and ultimately discovering the root cause… only to have it be something dumb or obvious, something I might have found in less time by just patiently rereading the code.
You can use a world class debugger, known as gdb, with Go, and yes, they do provide extensions for gdb to make it understand high-level Go constructs (such as goroutines, maps, slices, channels, ...): https://golang.org/doc/gdb
So if you want me to spell it out, here you go: it's bizarre to expect a debugger from modern compiled languages which have been FOSS from the beginning.
Also fails regarding other FOSS languages like Python, which have had a debugger since ever.
I said compiled language, which Python isn't. Yes, gdb won't help you debugging scripting/VM languages.
Anyway, this is getting off topic, as we're talking about the alleged lack for debuggers for Go binaries for today's Go users, and neither of the things you mentioned are relevant. In my experience, nitpicking rarely leads to anything fruitful.
And if I have to mention a FOSS compiled language instead of Python, with debugger support out of the box, then Oberon, Modula-2, FreeBasic, Gambas and FreePascal come to mind.
https://github.com/derekparker/delve
Apparently Delve supports Win and OSX/macOS too, though I've not tried it on those in years. On BSD though... there's no debugging story. :(
This is especially true in Go where the type checker gives you a lot of confidence that your code works before you run it.