What do you mean about so slow there are semantic implications? How does execution speed change meaning? Can you give an example? And are you talking about VS specifically, or just debugging in general? Gdb can be extremely slow when debugging too, and besides that, simply turning on symbols and turning off optimizations can be a major reason for slowdowns.

For the connection issues, I rarely if ever see that with VS. Usually I’m launching my executable from the debugger. I’m not generally doing remote debugging, or attach-to-process debugging — is that what you’re talking about? Certainly all debuggers have those kinds of issues with remote debugging or attaching to processes. Are these issues better in some other debugger you use? If so, I’m certainly curious to hear about it, I would love to learn & use something that’s superior.