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First Rust debugging survey finds over half of developers do not currently use a debugger
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The Rust compiler team published results from their first Debugging Survey, collecting over 2,300 responses and revealing that more than half of Rust developers do not currently use a debugger, with async debugging adoption particularly low.
The survey quantifies what the Rust community has suspected: debugger tooling is underused, and the async debugging experience is clumsy enough that only a quarter of respondents attempt it. For teams building Rust systems, this data confirms that print-based debugging remains the practical norm and that debugger investment is still early.
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Over 46% of respondents currently use a debugger in Rust, meaning more than half do not, and roughly half of beginners have never used one.
Print debugging and the dbg! macro are the most popular approaches; lldb in an IDE leads among proper debuggers, followed by gdb on the command line.
Only a quarter of respondents use a debugger for async code, where the experience is described as clumsy and incomplete.
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