Purposefully debugging without using a debugger?

Question

In chapter 5 of \"The Practice of Programming\" Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike write:

As a personal choice, we tend not to use debuggers beyond getting a st

Answer 1

These guys come from the unix era where full fledged IDE's were not at hand. Thats why adding printf is much faster than starting up GDB.

Nowadays setting a breakpoint in visual studio is the fastest way to debug, so everyone uses that

On different platforms like embedded devices, having printfs to a log file or something similar is still the fastest option

Answer 2

Some bugs may show themselves only in release mode therefore using a debugger may not be possible. In those situations, i often use printf :).