Have there been any improvements in debuggers in the past 20 years or so? When I start up pdb I feel like nothing has changed. Am I missing something huge?
What innovations, specifically, have been added to debuggers in recent years?
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Have there been any improvements in debuggers in the past 20 years or so? When I start up pdb I feel like nothing has changed. Am I missing something huge?
What innovations, specifically, have been added to debuggers in recent years?
I think “debuggers” have stayed the same for a quite a while. Most just give you information about callstack, threads, locals, globals and maybe some expression evaluation. That feature set is pretty well defined and it works so it hasn’t change much. It probably doesn’t need to.
A debugger helps you figure out your program flow where as many other diagnostic tools have decided to focus on very specific issues. Instead of limiting ourselves to the traditional debugger lets look at the whole space of diagnostic tools since they also help us debug our problems.
There are certainly main more tools that help with debugging very specific issues: profilers, network traffic analyzers (WireShark, HTTPFox), many SysInternals tools, and even /proc.