Chouquette's blog

Important part of the developpment process is "wasted" in debugging. The most used technique (or at least, the technique I most observed at school) is the good old printf technique, or for c++ programmers std::cout/cerr, but there are a few drawbacks with this technique :

• You need to recompile your code
• Both printf and std::cout are buffering the data you want to print, and in some case, it can hide your memory allocation bugs, and your code will run with the debug stuff, but will crash without.
• It's hard to get some informations about which function called this one, or about the entire callstack
• It's annoying to get the process id, but mostly the thread id, in case multithreaded program developpment.

But like every problem, there's a solution, that isn't used enough considering the advantages it offers.

In visual studio, a breakpoint isn't just about pausing the execution when reached, it's a lot more, and I invite you to read the following arcticle