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ryg: you are just repeating what I said :-)

On that qualification topic: One day when hiring at the company I work at they had a candidate that seriously stated he would never use a debugger. They asked him why and he replied that he didn't need it... Man, that guy must have been damn good! They didn't hire him though... Still not sure why... ;)

curiously enough, you tend to develop a liking to good debuggers when you work with dynamic code generation and/or programs that perform binary instrumentation on other programs... weird, huh? :)

rarefluid: maybe because he never bothered to fix bugs :)

well debuggers aren't so great sometimes

specially when they don't work at all (Delphi2007 + Intraweb... ugh :) )

or when the breakpoints stop working after a while (c++ builder 6)

or when they don't properly support assembly-level debugging and are otherwise stuck in the 80s (gdb).

or when the IDE is totally confused about wheter a code block is actually compiled in or not (#ifdefs). Happenes here sometimes on VC2005. But hey, this code is the worst I've ever seen... And I've seen and written a lot myself... :)

2008? We still use 1998 (VC++6) at work. I tried installing 2005 but it didn't like the 7 GB workspace. I've heard that link time was improved, but it just brought my development box to a standstill so I got rid of it.

ryg wrote:

I agree on all points, except for the "embedded"... I work on PDA/phones now, and yes, even for the last tiny shit of hardware, I am told to do everything in java/C# for portability purposes, and that C/C++ will be no more supported in the coming years for such devices...

that's one part of the embedded devices market - for phones/pdas, there's also symbian/BREW (both c++), and there's also lots of embedded devices besides phones: network/telecommunications switches/routers, dvd/hd-dvd/blu-ray players and set-top boxes, subway ticket machines, process control in industrial manufacturing, etc.

what about satellites or military stuff ? :)

and control for airplanes, chemical/nuclear reactors and digital toasters! and calculators!

after developing for more than a few hours with any non-microsoft console of your choice, you come to realise how much you love vs's debugger really. :)

you get the same experience trying to debug under, say, linux :)

my ps2 dev last year was painful. Relying on just the crash location and register content oh that was bad. On the Nec PC Engine I use emulators' save states, which is quite decent on such memory amount.

about satellites: the on-board software is often C or asm. in some cases it's even a hardware implementation of a state machine. this is because there is a trade-off between error resillience of the hardware and speed (typical satellite cpu's are slow as snails, comparable to oldschool demoscene platforms).

the ground segment software may be java or whatnot high-level stuffs, the same for analysis software (matlab, idl, python, etc). but some ground software for test may also require a real-time os. all of those real-time code is written in C.

So true :)