Xcode with SCons

I'm not a big fan of using IDEs for project builds, but IDEs excel at source-level debugging. The scons wiki has information on how to use Apple's Xcode with scons. This works great.

I tend to agree with folks who advocate unit testing and print/log debugging over stepping through code. I've seen my share of debugger-obsessed developers (to the point of writing custom plugins for Visual Studio) who could have spent a lot less time in the debugger if they'd spent more time writing clean code with TDD. However, I've seen the opposite sort of developer: writing test after test without solving the bug. If you can narrow down where the bug is occurring, stepping through code, line by line, will often reward the patient programmer and quickly rule out the wild, paranoid theories about compiler bugs that everyone develops in the absence of hard evidence.