[nardi]

Having worked in many languages and debuggers across many kinds of backend and front end systems, I think what some folks miss here is that some debuggers are great and fast, and some suck and are extremely slow. For example, using LLDB with Swift is hot garbage. It lies to you and frequently takes 30 seconds or more to evaluate statements or show you local variable values. But e.g. JavaScript debuggers tend to be fantastic and very fast. In addition, some kinds of systems are very easy to exercise in a debugger, and some are very difficult. Some bugs resist debugging, and must be printf’d.

In short, which is better? It depends, and varies wildly by domain.