In my opinion, when you're serious about debugging your code, you'll use your own debugging tools, and from experience I'd say that using handles is not an issue.
But yeah, standard IDEs won't see anything behind the opaque reference.
But yeah, standard IDEs won't see anything behind the opaque reference.
So what does this mean about my past debugging experiences? And and those of everyone else who uses an IDE? They've been jokes all along?
I've worked in fields where no debugger where available, not even printf. (embedded software, interrupt driven)
I had to write ad-hoc debugging tools with difficult contraints.
I grew the habit of debugging by reading the code first, then using traces, then writing custom tests or ad-hoc tools as last resort solution. (extremely rare)
I used Visual Studio debugger and GDB a few times, but I've not been convinced by the productivity gains, quite the contrary, but I am probably not using them well.
In practice, the most difficult bugs are often tied to concurrency issues, and I haven't found much help with those general purpose tools.