How frequently do you use profilers/debuggers at work?

pinkpatrol@anarch.is to Programming@beehaw.org – 21 points –

I know profilers and debuggers are a boon for productivity, but anecdotally I've found they're seldom used. How often do you use debuggers/profilers in your work? What's preventing you? conversely, what enables you to use them?

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How do people do stuff without debuggers? :D

Another way to develop would be through iterating within a Unit Test that you don't plan to keep around.

Uh, I set a breakpoint and run the app?

To add a bit more context, it's more difficult to configure a debugger when the application is running within something like Docker. How difficult? That depends on the language and tools you're using.

I've seen the fun of "prints everywhere" in production when a colleague forgot to remove a "Why the fuck do you end up here?" followed by a bunch of variables before committing a hot-fix... Customers weren't to amused...

Edit: That was a PHP driven web shop and the message ended up on to of the checkout page

That must've prompted a bit of existential crisis in some shoppers. I can see going to purchase some useless consumer shit online and getting a message "Why the fuck do you end up here?" and just closing my browser and rethinking my life decisions.

@Nicktar I usually prefer the prints everywhere approach, but of course printing to STDERR not STDOUT - so it ends up in a log, and not in the program output 😅 won't make that mistake again!

We run almost everything on bare metal during development. The ci/cd pipeline runs containerized and also produces a container with the application inside, that then gets deployed to production. But we don't debug on production, so that isn't an issue.

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