On Wednesday, 6 February 2019 at 22:22:26 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
Of course, I've no clue whether this is the cause of your
problems -- it's just one of many possibilities. Pointer bugs
are nasty things to debug, regardless of whether or not they've
been abstracted away in nicer clothing. I still remember
pointer bugs that took literally months just to get a clue on,
because it was nigh impossible to track down where they
happened -- the symptoms are too far removed from the cause.
You pretty much have to take a wild guess and get lucky.
They are just as bad as race condition bugs. (Once, a race
condition bug took me almost half a year to fix, because it
only showed up in the customer's live environment and we could
never reproduce it locally. We knew there was a race somewhere,
but it was impossible to locate it. Eventually, by pure
accident, an unrelated code change subtly altered the timings
of certain things that made the bug more likely to manifest
under certain conditions -- and only then were we finally able
to reliably reproduce the problem and track down its root
cause.)
T
I am not sure if it's a pointer bug. What worries me is that it
breaks at the start of the program, but uncommenting code at the
end of the program influences it. Unless there's some crazy
reordering going on, this shouldn't normally have an effect. I
still believe the bug is on the compiler side, but it's a bit of
code in my case, and if I try to minimize the case, the issue
disappears. Oh well.
