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Comment by forrestthewoods | Hacker News Reader

Ninja is pretty popular with gamedevs.

I was amused by this line:

> But Windows is still a huge platform in terms of developers, and those developers are starved for tools.

As a primarily Windows dev I feel that it is poor Linux devs who are starved for tools! Living life without a good debugger (Visual Studio) or profiler (Superluminal) is so tragic. ;(

It does feel like in recent years the gap between the two platforms is increasingly minimal. I definitely like all the Rust utilities that generally work crossplatform for example.

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Every time somebody puts "Visual Studio" on the same sentence as "good" I get that strange feeling the Universe is a simulation and other people are interacting here, but do come from a different one.

I can't make for any other explanation. I can't think on any interaction with it that I would describe as "good". I can think of a few "minimally ok", but debugging isn't one of them. (But at least on the 2022 the debugger isn't full of bugs anymore. Maybe that's what this is about.)

I don’t like working in Visual Studio much, and I am a big fan of gdb too (and of Chrome’s debugger when working in JavaScript), but for C++ debugging, the Visual Studio debugger is excellent, and has been near the top of the class for a long time, compared to other debuggers. That is the explanation.

I don’t doubt there are warts, but for you what’s missing or sub-par from VS that is better elsewhere? What debuggers do you consider better? Gdb is also excellent, but in a different way. Gdb is programmable and that maybe makes it more powerful. (I don’t know if VS debugging is scriptable, I think it wasn’t last time I tried.) But gdb’s learning curve, lack of UI (even with tui), and lack of discoverability is a major impediment to it’s use. You mentioned interaction, and interaction is what holds back gdb.

For a start, more speed would be great. It's slow to start, end, and slows down the code so much that it has semantic implications.

Also, it can fail loudly if it loses the control of the target process or if the target process fails before it finishes connecting. Also, it should not run after the UI reports that it finished.

So I’m still left curious which debuggers are much better than VS?

What do you mean about so slow there are semantic implications? How does execution speed change meaning? Can you give an example? And are you talking about VS specifically, or just debugging in general? Gdb can be extremely slow when debugging too, and besides that, simply turning on symbols and turning off optimizations can be a major reason for slowdowns.

For the connection issues, I rarely if ever see that with VS. Usually I’m launching my executable from the debugger. I’m not generally doing remote debugging, or attach-to-process debugging — is that what you’re talking about? Certainly all debuggers have those kinds of issues with remote debugging or attaching to processes. Are these issues better in some other debugger you use? If so, I’m certainly curious to hear about it, I would love to learn & use something that’s superior.

Pernosco https://pernos.co/ Is vastly better than any debugger I’ve ever used.

Gdb is horrible, vs debugger is quite good but has strange limitations

Visual Studio debugger for C++ is still best in class. It’s far from perfect. But Linux doesn’t even have anything that attempts to compete. Command line GDB and LLDB are not comparable.

In what world do you live in where the visual studio debugger in considered good? Or have they finally got around to fixing it? Last I tried it was unbearably slow, like seconds to step a single line

I do admit I haven't used it for almost a decade but wasn't vs debugger (at least for cpp) considered top notch and unrivaled? What's better nowadays?

Sounds like a hardware issue, works fine on my machine. No speed issues at all.

The world where I’ve used it professionally debug C++ for almost 20 years?

It’s certainly not perfect. But “seconds to step a single line” is not normal. Certainly not what I experience. Even when debugging very large code bases like Unreal Engine.

There is a community that thinks UNIX is the be all, end all of developer tools, and then they miss the trees from the forest.

I know UNIX pretty well, since being introduced to Xenix in 1993, used plenty of variants, and yet my main use of WSL is to run Linux docker containers and nothing else.

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