You have heard of debuggers, right? Just because every IDE includes one doesn't mean they don't exist outside of IDEs. (For that matter, when I used to develop on Windows, I pulled up Microsoft IDE for debugging only.)

Honestly, though, probably 80-90% of the time I do prefer printfs for debugging. A debugger is great if you can easily get to the problem area. If you're just trying to figure out what is going wrong with complex code, dumping a lot of information in a format you can easily look over with a text editor is generally a superior approach.

I've always found that print statements are usually best for code I wrote myself, whereas a debugger is most useful for other people's code.

I've found those times people can't figure out why code doesn't work at all is almost always related to over reliance and trust of what the debugger is claiming to be truth.

It can be faster, but output (printf or more complicated state outputs) seems to always be more reliable.

A combination of the two can be quite nice ;)

gdb? ddd?

I don't compile my code inside vim, so why should I expect to be able to debug it there?

Learning that the tools don't have to be integrated with each other to be useful was a major eye-opener for me, after using MSVC for many years.

gdb is terrible compared to a good integrated debugger. Honestly, its laughable that people try to compare the two. /coming from someone who used gdb for years