[joelgwebber]

I'll be honest -- I hate working without a debugger. Go's gdb support was never great, and the team appears to have decided it's a fool's errand. On the other hand, the Delve project looks like it's serious about building a "real" debugger for Go (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8595407). Supposedly it works on Linux, but I'm waiting on Mac support, which I understand is held up on Linux/Mach/Darwin differences.

In the meantime, I've gotten pretty good at printf() debugging (I worked on embedded systems in a past life, so it's a skill I've had to develop). I'm also considering adding some more structured log/trace/metrics stuff (perhaps exposed via a simple web UI) that would allow me to escape the "tyranny of the ever-scrolling console".

But in the end, I'll consider Go dead for game development (at least for me) if the debugger situation doesn't get fixed. I'm just betting that it will.

[tshannon]

In my hobby game programming, the first thing I got nailed down was writing messages to the screen.

Not as good as debugger, but invaluable when you need to see the specific value (position, etc) of an object right next to the object on screen.

I'd also usually have a key bound to spit out a frequently change buffer of debug information that I could call up at any time.