My very first post is going to be merely a rant about what I went through with a compiler installation error, but I do this just for the record and to never forget this milestone.

Today I installed VSCode to embark on my USACO journey. However, my debugger would not work. It was a GDB debugger.

VSCode could not find the GDB debugger.

I discovered that the folders and directories were all jumbled up. There were repetitive files in different directories. one of them had a gdb.exe file and the other did not.

The problem dates back to when I took my first programming class in college.

It was an asynchronous course where the main material of which was just a learning website.

The course required me to install this very specific IDE, which was CLion. And then it required me to install the MinGW compiler(or a package that had a compiler & debugger & other things within it). This was where all the problems broke out.

The MinGW installer would not work. It shot out an error message: "Program has been installed incorrectly!"

According to what the almighty people in StackOverFlow said, I tweaked the environment variables. It did not work.

According to what the other almighty people in StackOverFlow said, I decided to download the compiler itself as a .7z file.

I somehow made it work by placing it directly under the C:\ directory.

The PROBLEM was that I could not use the debugger.

Yes, I was lucky enough to prove that it was possible to go through an entire college CS course without using a debugger.

I was able to get an A grade but it was painful.

But anyways, after the course, I just left it alone because I did not want to suffer from it anymore.

Until today.

Today I deleted and reinstalled VSCode three times, MinGW 13 times, and permanently deleted Code::Blocks which I had on my laptop before I went to college.

I finally made it work. I feel that it was just the wrong placement & redundancies of the directories all along.

I still cannot understand perfectly how it works, but I am just glad it worked.

Anyways this is the end of my rant. Thank you for your time.

From now on, I am going to practice other OJs to get better at Competitive Programming and Problem Solving using this compiler and debugger I fixed.

TL;DR: It felt awesome today for finally successfully running both GDB and G++...