u/grimvianin r/C_Programming • Recommends
Again a great video about debugging by the C guru, Eskil Steenberg:
Debugging and the art of avoiding bugs
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Debugging and the art of avoiding bugs
Eskil Steenberg
37K subscribers • 6 videos on Hallway
- Recommended by 2 people: 2 in engineering communities.
- Presented by Eskil Steenberg
- An opinion. It argues one side of a question engineers disagree on.
Intermediate. Assumes working knowledge.
34K views1 year ago2 recommendations
Tools and practiceSystems programmingDebuggingCTesting
Eskil Steenberg discusses strategies, philosophy, and tools for debugging and reducing bugs in C code.
In this video Eskil Steenberg Hald talks about strategies for debugging and reducing bugs in code. You will learn how to think about debugging and the code you write and my philosophy on reducing bugs wile keeping momentum. While mostly focused on the C language, most of it is applicable to any programming languages. The Forge memory debugger can be downloaded from: www.quelsolaar.com/forge_memory_debugger.zip You can find my work on: quelsolaar.com Socials: @eskilsteenberg Regularly stream on: twitch.tv/quel_solaar Join our Discord at: discord.com/invite/Scg6trNUyWWhy it's here
2 people recommend thisWhat people say. Recommended as an excellent guide on debugging strategies and philosophy by a veteran C programmer.
u/Better_Pirate_7823in r/C_Programming • Recommends
Debugging and the art of avoiding bugs by Eskil Steenberg (2025)
u/LordRybecin r/C_Programming • Mentions
On “What's the most useful debugging habit you've developed?”
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This provides a lot of advice on different ways to avoid bugs and make debugging easier. Probably *the* number one thing I got out of it is to avoid using "features" that cause code to be run implicitly. Exception catching, destructors, operator overloading, and a lot of common features in various languages do this, and it makes debugging awful, because you can't just follow the flow of execution and expect to come across the code that caused the bug, because that code may very well not even be in the flow, and might have been implicitly triggered by something else. C doesn't have many features that *can* do this, but it still has some. Avoid them when you can, and debugging wi…
u/grimvianin r/C_Programming • Mentions
On “C is the language I eventually settled on”
Hmm - try this video by Eskild Steenberg: Debugging and the art of avoiding bugs
[video
u/LordRybecin r/C_Programming • Mentions
On “Why are you using C?”
…earned C++ as the primarily language taught in my undergrad program, and honestly, it's harder to write and read than C. Sure, objects, operating overloading, and so on, but those don't actually make the programming easier, and they make debugging much more difficult. (If you want to fully understand why C++ is much harder to debug, watch this: [video ) I'm quite good at programming, but my skill and speed increased dramatically when I moved to C. In addition, I spend far less time debugging, and I almost never have to pull out a debugger, because everything is explicit.
For my work, I do a lot of bitwise number manipulation. This requires fixed width values (I literally can't do som…