Defensive programming and debugging

Friday 9 May 2025, 09:00 → 13:00 Europe/Brussels

Topics covered

All code contains bugs, finding and fixing them is boring. In this training, best practices are presented to reduce the number of bugs in your code. You will also learn about debuggers and debugging techniques to find bugs more efficiently.

• best practices in coding, code style, error handling
• using compiler options to warn about potential issues
• unit and functional testing
• using a debugger (breakpoints, inspection, watchpoints, tracing  …)
• zoo of bugs
• optional: debugging parallel code

Previous knowledge

• experience programming C, C++, or Fortran
• familiarity with the bash command line
• optional: experience using MPI and/or OpenMP