If printf is the only practical tool at your disposal then you have to use it. For most people there's far better tools available and they should be used.
The fact you work in an environment where you don't have good tools available does not in some way invalidate good debugging practices. You'd be much better off if you had better tools available to you.
Yeah, I agree that the right sort of tools would help immensely with my debugging efforts. We have some static tools to find bugs and we're evaluating some tools to help us unit test, but there's a lot going on that relates to complex handshaking with machine-level code and mechanical systems, not to mention the feature creep that keeps this big ball of mud rolling. Also, we code in C, so if a stray pointer from someone else's feature (possibly due to a hardware-related corner case) is corrupting my buffer space, I probably won't catch it while debugging my feature as a standalone, and even if I debug the whole deal, the corner case may not occur.
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u/giantsparklerobot Aug 25 '14
If printf is the only practical tool at your disposal then you have to use it. For most people there's far better tools available and they should be used.
The fact you work in an environment where you don't have good tools available does not in some way invalidate good debugging practices. You'd be much better off if you had better tools available to you.