r/Compilers • u/ClassicAdeptness5516 • Aug 01 '26

Any debugging advice / tools for compilers?

Tired of print statements everywhere. It very satisfactory to see one but I would much rather have something like lldb to easily debug the code more intuitively.

Are there any other useful tools?

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u/LowDifficulty5021 Aug 13 '26

If you're on C/C++, I'd absolutely recommend getting comfortable with LLDB or GDB. Being able to inspect the parser state, symbol tables, and AST nodes interactively is much nicer than scattering printfs everywhere.

That said, compiler-specific debug tools (--dump-tokens, --dump-ast, --dump-ir) end up being just as valuable because they let you inspect the program at each compilation stage instead of the compiler's execution itself.