Comment by dap
10 months ago
I’m not sure what use case you’re coming from but it sounds like you’re saying something like: most end users don’t use a profiler or debugger so why should they pay the cost of debuggability? That’s fine I guess if you’re throwing software over a wall to users and taking no responsibility for their experience. But a lot of people who build software do take some responsibility for bugs and performance problems that their users experience. This stuff is invaluable for them. End users benefit (tremendously) from software being debuggable even if the users themselves never run a profiler or debugger that uses the frame pointers (because the developers are able to find and fix problems reported by other users or the developers themselves).
[flagged]
While I somewhat support the idea of avoiding debug-mode applications shipped to end customers, it seems in this particular case Brendan argues about the need to debug binaries in runtime on the server side. If there is a binary component running in production, the choice of running it with debug enabled (and/or with an ability to activate debug in runtime) is purely choice of the system owners (who nowadays are both the developers and the operators of components).
“Observability” primarily refers to ability to view system state beyond of what blackbox monitoring does. Again, the term primarily refers to server side operations and not to software shipped to end users.
As much as spying on users is ugly, it’s not related to debugging server side.