If you grew up doing windows C++ development, looking at things in a debugger is your first step. You only resort to printing values if you can't immediately see what happened in the debugger.

A lot of other envioronment/language cultures are the opposite. Obviously both have their place, but I do feel like more people should use the debugger as the first step instead of the last.

Nice sentiment and an admirable goal. Not really actionable in practice. Even if we disregard all userspace libraries out there, fully understanding the most frequently used syscalls is a monumental task already. You have to pick your battles in terms of understanding parts of a complex system.

Sometimes I yearn for the Haskell or Idris style of programming where a dependency can do nothing harmful or stupid without me passing in permission.

Then I think about having to pass in thread handles and file handles to logging libraries. I don't know. It would be a cool option. There is probably a hack for `tracing` that would let me manage the logging thread myself.

Software is so complex these days. The funny solution of doing static-allocated C with no threads and no logging isn't gonna work for me. You aren't going to have WebRTC in from-scratch C.