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POIs it a good habit to run in debug mode?
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  1. POIs it a good habit to run in debug mode?
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    copied!<p>I saw a comment on another question (I forget which one) encouraging the asker to avoid testing his/her code in the debug harness unless strictly necessary, citing something to the effect of it acting as a crutch. There's certainly something to be said for developing the skill to deduce the cause of bugs without "direct" evidence. I'm quite a fan of debuggers myself (in fact, I tend to only run <em>without</em> if strictly necessary), but I got to thinking about the relative merits of each approach. </p> <h3>Debugger Pros</h3> <ul> <li>Starting with the obvious, takes less time to zero in on faults, exceptions and crashes</li> <li>Tracing provides a nice alternative to littering your code with commented-out print statements</li> <li>Performance overhead can give you extra wiggle room, i.e. if your program is responsive while debugging, it will almost definitely be so in the wild</li> </ul> <h3>Debugger Cons</h3> <ul> <li>Performance overhead can make iterations slower</li> <li>(Edit) <em>Tunnel Vision</em>: Debugging the symptom can distract you from deducing the cause when the crash occurs long after or far from the defect</li> <li>It may "help" you by initializing variables or otherwise masking bugs, leading to surprises later on</li> <li>Conversely, there's the odd bug that <em>only</em> crops up in a debug configuration; tracking it down may be a waste of effort (though, this is often indicative of a deeper, subtler problem that <em>is</em> worth fixing)</li> </ul> <p>These are general, of course--it varies wildly with language, environment and situation--but what are some other considerations?</p>
 

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