What does HackerNews think of delve?

I do not use a debugger (2016) | Aug 2023

Go has a debugger. https://github.com/go-delve/delve

Ask HN: Why are we not using debuggers more? | Aug 2022

I use a debugger every day. Delve[0] Go's debugger made me love the process of debugging my code – either attaching the debugger to an existing running process or the feedback loop of debugging the test code until make it passes the test case.

Back in the days when I didn't use one, it was a miserable developer experience. Thanks to Go and his great decision of having unit testing built into their standard now writing tests and debugging them is a joy.

Far are the days of not using a debugger because the programing language of choice didn't treat debuggers/unit testing as a first-class citizen. I could say that now I sleep a lot better thanks to coding my backends on Go and having the confidence that I can go as much depth as I want to fix any bug.

Debugging for me is an automatic action like drinking water when you're thirsty; two clicks (set breakpoint and click the debug button) and I'm back into the debugger, again.

[0]: https://github.com/go-delve/delve

Tokio Console | Dec 2021

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Go also has pretty good out of the box profiling (pprof[0]) and third-party runtime debugging (delv[1]) that can be used both remotely and local.

These tools also have decent editor integration and can be use hand in hand:

https://blog.jetbrains.com/go/2019/04/03/profiling-go-applic...

https://blog.jetbrains.com/go/2020/03/03/how-to-find-gorouti...

[0] https://github.com/google/pprof

[1] https://github.com/go-delve/delve

Debugging Go Code with GDB | May 2020

https://github.com/go-delve/delve

That's an older page, check out delve, it's like GDB specific to go!

The Zen of Go | Feb 2020

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The beauty of Go is that it's so simple that you don't need a debugger. Do you need a word dictionary to read this comment? No, because this comment is simple. Same with Go. But if you need a debugger, there is Delve [1], though I only used it once to debug a dynamic programming algorithm.

[1] https://github.com/go-delve/delve

Go's Tooling Is an Undervalued Technology | Jan 2020

I definitely appreciate many parts of go's tooling ecosystem: pprof, gofmt, go get (in GOPATH mode), and go bug are all pretty good ideas. pprof in particular and the various profiling tools build out around it are great.

That being said, I haven't found all aspects to be as nice - most notably among these is the lack of a good debugging environment. There is no debugger in the go tool, and users rely on delve[0] for their debugging needs. The dlv command line tool has actually gotten a lot better over the last couple years (props to the maintainers!), but integration in to visual front-ends is still lacking. VS Code and GoLand integrations at least are lacking to the point of it being nearly unusable except in the simplest cases. For a few examples, stepping is painfully slow (there are several machines/OSes I use), conditional breakpoints don't seem to work, keeping the tools up to date doesn't work consistently which means updating the underlying go/delve tooling or the IDE will frequently break the experience, and defining your debugging processes (e.g. via VS Code's launch.json) is tedious. None of these are go's fault per se, but it diminishes the overall experience.

In general, it would be nice to have a better debugging experience, esp. since I prefer a GUI tool to the command line for debugging. In the meantime, I might switch back to just using command line dlv.

But regardless, definitely agreed that go's tooling on the whole is great. pprof has saved my skin on countless occassions!

[0] https://github.com/go-delve/delve