[gghoop]

If using the debugger is less efficient than using printf then it's a symptom of a wider problem. To be clear though, "printf debugging" is not the same thing as adding structured debug logs to your service and enabling it on demand via some config. Most production services should never be logging unstructured output to stdout. Printf debugging is just throwing out some text to stdout, and it generally means running unit tests locally and iterating through an (add printf, run test, add more printf) loop until the bug is found. Unfortunately it's the default way to debug locally reproducible bugs for so many engineers. So while I don't see the point in not using printf for purely ideological reasons, I avoid building software where this is the simplest option and use the service's structured logger if not easily reproducible. I also generally think it's bad to default to printf debugging in the way I have defined it here and find that competent use of debugger is more often a faster way to debug.

[hot_gril]

That wider problem may simply be that you're using C or C++ with optimized binaries and can't reproduce the bug in the unoptimized/debug build.