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Comment by eminence32 | Hacker News Reader

In my experience Java debuggers are exceptionally powerful, much more so than what I've seen from C/C++/Rust debuggers.

If I'm debugging some complicated TomEE application that might take 2 minutes to start up, then I'm absolutely reaching to an IntelliJ debugger as one of my first tools.

If I'm debugging some small command line application in Rust that will take 100ms to exhibit the failure mode, there's a very good chance that adding a println debug statement is what I'll try first

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CLion adds the power of IntelliJ debuggers to Rust. It works exceptionally well.

Do you have more information about this?

Last time I debugged Rust with CLion/RustRover, the debugger was the same as VSCode uses.

Sure. It’s got breakpoints, and conditional breakpoints, using the same engine as IntelliJ. It’s got evaluate, it’s got expression and count conditionals, it’s got rewind. It has the standard locals view.

Rust support has improved in 2024 pretty strongly (before this year it just shelled out to lldb); the expr parser and more importantly the variable viewer are greatly improved since January.

Does it support evaluating code, in context, while debugging?

Yes*, mostly

It can do any single expression, and the results are better than lldb, but it can’t do multiple statements and not everything in Rust can be one expression; you can’t use {} here

> much more so than what I've seen from C/C++/Rust debuggers.

...have you ever used the Visual Studio integrated debugger for C/C++ instead of 'raw' gdb/lldb without a UI frontend?

I mean, even then c/CPP will optimize out stuff and you won't get as nice one-to-one mapping as you do with eg. Java.

That's why the debug build config one uses during development only does little to no optimizations.

My point is that even that little can sometimes lead to less pleasant experiences, like stepping half a function's body ahead.

Hmm, I've only seen that in some 'new-ish' languages sometimes (like currently Zig), which I think is a compiler bug when generating debug info. In C/C++ I see such random stepping only when trying to debug an optimized program.

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