gdb

FIRST-HAND READS

What people reported, in their own words. Every line links to where it was said.

• “I could at least debug when registers were getting trashed etc with GDB”

  POSITIVE · performance · Hacker News · 2026-06-30

• “if you can repro a bug, you can walk the event trace until it's sitting there in GDB and shit”

  POSITIVE · performance · Hacker News · 2026-06-14

• “GDB (or lldb, or valgrind, etc.) is useful for debugging just about anything”

  POSITIVE · features · Hacker News · 2026-05-14

• “gdb just stops being useful since it doesn't know anything about segmented memory”

  NEGATIVE · performance · Hacker News · 2026-04-22

• “debugging mutable state is much easier than debugging a distributed system. Even in C if some global gets mishandled I can just use: gdb, dtrace, strace or even just look at a core dump and know that whatever caused the problem will be discoverable”

  POSITIVE · performance · Hacker News · 2026-04-06

• “being able to just fire up gdb and get an immediate landscape of what the issues were in the program was just invaluable”

  MIXED · ease of use · Hacker News · 2026-02-22

• “gdb thread apply all bt is slow but does full call stack walking”

  NEGATIVE · performance · Hacker News · 2026-01-25

• “some tools like gdb have unergonomic support for tracing so there I tend to use break points or printf debugging just because the tracing support is so bad in gdb.”

  NEGATIVE · features · Hacker News · 2025-12-30

• “handlig c++ types with gdb can be a nightmare and you either develop your own gdb glue code or write c-like c++”

  NEGATIVE · ease of use · Hacker News · 2025-11-25

• “thrilled to see it using GDB with inhuman speed and efficiency”

  POSITIVE · performance · Hacker News · 2025-11-23

• “spending a year aimlessly typing "si" into GDB was not the most effective way to learn assembly”

  NEGATIVE · ease of use · Hacker News · 2025-10-16

• “It probably didn't help that I don't have access to valgrind or gdb on this platform.”

  NEGATIVE · Hacker News · 2025-10-16

• “I used dprintf in gdb, but the advantage to simple prints was not huge.”

  LUKEWARM · performance · Hacker News · 2025-10-07

• “My favourite feature is using GDB with Valgrind+vgdb. That allows you to see what memory is addressable and/or initialised from within GDB.”

  POSITIVE · features · Hacker News · 2025-10-02

• “going back to gdb after it is like banging rocks together to make fire”

  NEGATIVE · ease of use · Hacker News · 2025-09-23

• “gdb is more easily scriptable and more powerful in certain situations, so I reach for gdb sometimes for the harder bugs”

  POSITIVE · features · Hacker News · 2025-09-11

• “with gdb, it is very likely that the release build doesn't show me what I want to see, so I need to do a full debug build from scratch which takes much longer, and sometimes no longer replicates the bug”

  NEGATIVE · ease of use · Hacker News · 2025-09-10

• “when I fire up gdb, I can't see any function information or anything, and it has so many system calls it's really difficult to follow through blindly”

  NEGATIVE · performance · Hacker News · 2025-09-10

• “whipping out gdb is faster than adding prints and recompiling”

  POSITIVE · ease of use · Hacker News · 2025-09-10

• “a smart gdb script that runs when the core is dumped, before it gets written to a readable location. Writing the script also helped to demonstrate how to extract the passwords in the first place.”

  POSITIVE · features · Hacker News · 2025-09-07

• “I don't mind popping into gdb if that's what would most directly answer my question, but that only happens a couple of times a year.”

  LUKEWARM · ease of use · Hacker News · 2025-09-01

• “The biggest usecase for me for GDB has been to inspect stacktraces”

  MIXED · features · Hacker News · 2025-09-01

• “debuggers like LLDB or GDB, need to be modified to understand OCaml's DWARF information”

  NEGATIVE · features · Hacker News · 2025-08-14

• “parsing GDB output was like an epiphany. I was for real blown away by it.”

  MIXED · performance · Hacker News · 2025-08-11