alt Hacker News> This was a very fun problem to debug.
I'm sure it was a relief to find a thorough solution that addressed the root cause. But it doesn't seem plausible that it was fun while it was unexplained. When I have this kind of bug it eats my whole attention.
Something this deep is especially frustrating. Nobody suspects the standard library or the compiler. Devs have been taught from a young age that it's always you, not the tools you were given, and that's generally true.
One time, I actually did find a standard library bug. I ended up taking apart absolutely everything on my side, because of course the last hypothesis you test is that the pieces you have from the SDK are broken. So a huge amount of time is spent chasing the wrong lead when it actually is a fundamental problem.
On top of this, the thing is a race condition, so you can't even reliably reproduce it. You think it's gone like they did initially, and then it's back. Like cancer.
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Some people are perverse individuals and actually enjoy debugging very esoteric things. What might be frustrating to you might be the very thing that gets someone else very excited.
The people who find the fun are often good at identifying when it is the standard library or the compiler.
Probably just meant satisfying instead of fun. I found a bug in sscanf for the gcc arm toolchain that ships with Ubuntu (and Debian), and it wasn't fun since I had deadlines to deal with. Workaround was to use the official ARM one. But after 2 days, it was satisfying to nail the exact problem and write a regression test.
> I'm sure it was a relief to find a thorough solution that addressed the root cause. But it doesn't seem plausible that it was fun while it was unexplained. When I have this kind of bug it eats my whole attention.
Yeah, and that's fun for me. Some of my most fun bugs to debug have been compiler, or even CPU issues.
Segfaults with no use of “Unsafe” equivalents in managed languages can give immediate indication it’s not a code problem.
It becomes fun when you narrow down to the solution. Before that it's hell.
I don't think I'd be allowed spend weeks to debug something like this. Credit to Cloudflare's PMs.
Although I’m good enough at it, like you I hate this kind of debugging experience, and try hard to avoid putting myself in a position where I have to do it. It’s not fun for me at all.
I also don’t like many puzzle games, like Sudoku, because to me they feel like this kind of work. Many colleagues of mine have expressed bafflement that I don’t find such puzzles fun and give me all kinds of grief about how I ought to enjoy them, since they do.
It’s the same thing here, just flipped around: this person seems to enjoy the debugging experience; just let them be. Or recruit them, because that temperament is valuable.
I find this sort of thing to be tremendously fun. It can be frustrating as well, but overall it’s my favorite part of my job. I don’t see why this would be implausible. Different people enjoy different things.
> Devs have been taught from a young age that it's always you, not the tools you were given, and that's generally true.
That's not been my experience at all FWIW. Tools get things wrong all the time.
Simply that more mature projects with heavy use like eg; gcc or clang/llvm generally tend to have had major bugs stamped out by this point. They do still happen though.
More nascent language and compiler ecosystems are more likely to run into issues. Especially languages with runtimes.
> I'm sure it was a relief to find a thorough solution that addressed the root cause. But it doesn't seem plausible that it was fun while it was unexplained. When I have this kind of bug it eats my whole attention.
Hey; it could've been type-3 fun.
It feels like this comment was almost a purely additive anecdote of your own experience with a similar kind of issue, but you've spoiled it by deciding to tell the author that they're incorrect about how they felt during the process?
Maybe different people find different things fun.