New & Revolutionary Debugging Techniques?

An anonymous reader writes "It seems that people are still using print statements to debug programs (Brian Kernighan does!). Besides the ol' traditional debugger, do you know any new debugger that has a revolutionary way to help us inspect the data? (don't answer it with ddd, or any other debugger that got fancy data display), what I mean is a new revolutionary way. I have only found one answer. It seems that Relative Debugging is quite neat and cool."

Comments

Print statements work fine for me, too

[YetAnotherName]

I haven't used a debugger in years; print statements are the only debugging tool I need.

But bear in mind that almost all of my work these days are in environments where the bugs that traditional debuggers help you find are pretty much impossible to make in the first place (Python, Java, etc.). Instead of tracing data structures through bits of memory and navigating stack frames, you just focus on the application itself. It's kind of refreshing.

Re:cool, but not useful

[Halo1]

Well, he has used the Omniscient Debugger to debug itself. In a paper published about it at the AADEBUG03 conference, the author writes

In actual experience with the ODB, neither CPU overhead nor memory requirements have proven to be a major stumbling block. Debugging the debugger with itself is not a problem on a 110 MHz SS4 with 128 MB. On a 700 MHz iBook it's a pleasure. All bugs encountered while developing the ODB fit easily into the 500k event limit of the small machine.

I also disagree with your assertion that all situations where experienced programmers need a debugger involve lots of code and large amounts of data. The former is most of the time true, but latter isn't necessarily.