There might be another factor at not using the debugger beyond the pure cluelessness: often you can’t really run it in production. Back when I started with coding (it was Turbo Pascal 3.0, so you get the idea :-), I enjoyed the use of the debugger quite a lot.
But in 2000 I started working in a role which required understanding the misbehavior of embedded systems that were forwarding the live traffic, there was a technical possibility to do “target remote …” but almost never an option to stop a box that is forwarding the traffic.
So you end up being dependent on debugs - and very occasional debug images with enhanced artisanal diagnostics code (the most fun was using gcc’s -finstrument-function to catch a memory corruption of an IPSec field by an unrelated IKE code in a use-after free scenario)
Where the GDB shined though is the analysis of the crash dumps.
Implementing a “fake” gdb stub in Perl, which was sucking in the crash dump data and allow to leisurely explore it with debugger rather than decoding hex by hand, was a huge productivity boon.
So I would say - it’s better to have more than one tool in the toolbox and use the most appropriate one.
But in 2000 I started working in a role which required understanding the misbehavior of embedded systems that were forwarding the live traffic, there was a technical possibility to do “target remote …” but almost never an option to stop a box that is forwarding the traffic.
So you end up being dependent on debugs - and very occasional debug images with enhanced artisanal diagnostics code (the most fun was using gcc’s -finstrument-function to catch a memory corruption of an IPSec field by an unrelated IKE code in a use-after free scenario)
Where the GDB shined though is the analysis of the crash dumps.
Implementing a “fake” gdb stub in Perl, which was sucking in the crash dump data and allow to leisurely explore it with debugger rather than decoding hex by hand, was a huge productivity boon.
So I would say - it’s better to have more than one tool in the toolbox and use the most appropriate one.