Debugging: easier than it used to be!

I just realised that, since I started doing free software development, debugging has become much easier than it used to be. At first, I didn’t even knew gdb, and debugged with printf()s. Totally impractical, slow, prone to error (as it moves corruptions to other places or even completely hide them), requires recompilation and a new run each time one needs more info. Then I learnt about gdb and how to use it. Once I could reproduce a bug, finding its root cause became much easier. Mid-2002, a crash handler was added to Claws Mail, which automatically attached gdb to a crashed process and got a backtrace. That increased the quality of our crasher bug reports, when Claws Mail was compiled with debug symbols. Distributions were more and more shipping with bug-buddy or equivalents, that did the same thing. It was still rather useless without debug symbols, but better than nothing… Then Valgrind came around, and that gem made tracking down corruptions, double-free...