Registration is now open for CppCon 2023! The conference starts on October 1 and will be held in person in Aurora, CO. To whet your appetite for this year’s conference, we’re posting videos of some of the top-rated talks from last year's conference. Here’s another CppCon talk video we hope you will enjoy – and why not register today for CppCon 2023!

Back to Basics: Debugging in C++

by Mike Shah

Summary of the talk:

I always tell my students, the debugger is your 'get out of jail free card' when working on a project. I say the same thing to professionals, debuggers are your 'get out of free jail card'. The reality is that programmers spend the majority of their time debugging as opposed to writing new code. Unfortunately many programmers do not learn how to use a debugger, or otherwise how they should approach debugging. In this talk I am going to show you how to debug C++ code, starting from the very basics and then demonstrating how a debugger like GDB can be used to help you track errors in CPU code. Attendees at this talk will learn names of debugging techniques (e.g. delta debugging), and I will demonstrate several debugging tools (stepping through code, capturing backtraces, conditional breakpoints, scripting, and even time traveling!) to demonstrate the power of debuggers. This is a beginner friendly talk where we are going to start from the beginning, but I suspect I may show a trick or two that folks with prior experience will appreciate.