Debugging Strategies, Tips, and Gotchas

Debugging can be tedious and painful if you don't set up your programs to help you debug them. In the spirit of "an apple a day keeps the doctor away", this article suggests approaches to writing code that's more debuggable, how to catch problems before they start, and gives you some time-wasting gotchas to watch out for and gives you some gotchas to watch out for.

Use the Right Tools

It should go without saying that you should always be using the best tools available; if you're hunting a segmentation fault, you want use a debugger. Anything less than that is unnecessary pain. If you're dealing with bizarre memory issues (or hard-to-diagnose segfaults), use Valgrind on Linux or Purify for Windows. more...