Comment by forrestthewoods | Hacker News Reader

Comment by forrestthewoods | Hacker News Reader

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forrestthewoods

> Leave us be. We know what we’re doing.

No. You’re wrong.

I’ll give you an example a plain vanilla ass bug that I dealt with today.

Teammate was trying to use portaudio with ALDA on one of cloud Linux machines for CI tests. Portaudio was failing to initialize with an error that it failed to find the host api.

Why did it fail? Where did it look? What actual operation failed? Who the fuck knows! With a debugger this would take approximately 30 seconds to understand exactly why it failed. Without a debugger you need to spend a whole bunch of time figuring out how a random third party library works to figure out where the fuck to even put a printf.

Printf debugging is great if it’s within systems you already know inside and out. If you deal with code that isn’t yours then debugger is more then an order of magnitude faster and more efficient.

It’s super weird how proud people are to not use tools that would save them hundreds of hours per year. Really really weird.

The hardest bug I had to track down took over a month, and a debugger wouldn't have helped one bit.

On the development system, the program would only crash, under a heavy load, on the order of hours (like over 12 hours, sometimes over 24 hours). On the production system, on the order of minutes (usually less than a hour). But never immediately. The program itself was a single process, no threads what-so-ever. Core dumps were useless as they were inconsistent (the crash was never in the same place twice).

I do think that valgrind (had I known about it at the time) would have found it ... maybe. It might have caught the memory corruption, but not the actual root cause of the memory corruption. The root cause was a signal handler (so my "non-threaded code" was technically, "threaded code") calling non-async-safe functions, such as malloc() (not directly, but in code called by the signal handler). Tough lesson I haven't forgotten.

Ok? A debugger also wouldn’t help the hardest bug I ever fixed!

It is not the only tool in the bag. But literally the first question anyone should ask when dealing with any bug is “would attaching a debugger be helpful?”. Literally everyone who doesn’t use a debugger is less effective at their jobs than if they frequently used a debugger.

A modern debugger would have made that trivial. Just turn on time travel debugging mode and you would have been done after the first time it occurred.

Wait until the memory is corrupted and causes a crash. Set a hardware breakpoint on the corrupted memory location and run backward until the memory location was written in the signal handler. Problem solved.

Memory corruption bugs in single-threaded code are a solved problem.

> It’s super weird how proud people are to not use tools that would save them hundreds of hours per year. Really really weird.

:eyeroll:

I use logs and printf. But printf is a tool of last resort, not first. Debugging consideration #1 is “attach debugger”.

I think the root issue is that most people on HN are Linux bash jockeys and Linux doesn’t have a good debugger. GDB/LLDB CLI are poop. Hopefully RadDebugger is good someday. RadDbg and Superluminal would go a long long way to improving the poor Linux dev environment.

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