Rust debugging survey 2026
12 points by adaszko
12 points by adaszko
I'm not entirely sure that "subpar debugging experience" maps one to one to "using a debugger".
As embarrassing as it is: I haven't used a debugger on rust linux/windows binaries in a long time. And I remember it being kinda miserable to get working on a typical VSCode setup.
One could argue that I rarely got so deep into the weeds of gnarly issues to actually need it, which might speak to the stability of rust. But that's definitely not going to help if you venture outside the safe space of the language.
Do you mean your log statements/print statements/etc. just get you there? Or your software's matured to the point where you just don't really need it? (but that wouldn't be embarrassing...) Or you just live with bugs?
What's your secret :)
It's multiple things.
One example is that you need good logging / tracing for long running software. The issue probably doesn't happen in dev and will be spurious.
Building on top of this, for high level software you probably don't need a full debugger. My example is a side project that is essentially shoving bytes (precisely) around in SQLITE and doing async web server things. Most of the time I am very happy to do print debugging because my journald logs will be 99% of my information anyway - odd JSON answers at some hours of certain days that show me I don't handle all edge cases.
It's a different story on embedded systems where you're glad to have JTAG available and look up what the state of the system is. But that's (hopefully) also not something you need for prod - because long running edge systems will also fall over when you have no access to JTAG and the event happened already. The same is true for C-interop or perf optimizations (really anything where it's helping to have a look inside the CPU state).
How DO people debug their rust code today? Any good docs or guides? I've used RustRover for a bit and it worked quite OK, when I used it to step through code manually and I've done logging. But I don't do any rust in a professional capacity