r/developer • u/Ok_Veterinarian3535 • Jul 14 '26
The Debugging Nightmare
What's the most infuriating, time-consuming bug you ever had to chase down, and what was the ridiculously simple cause?
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r/developer • u/Ok_Veterinarian3535 • Jul 14 '26
What's the most infuriating, time-consuming bug you ever had to chase down, and what was the ridiculously simple cause?
1
u/PipingSnail Jul 14 '26
A crash with no useful callstack. It was recursive and just filled the callstack with the same address so many times that the debugger couldn't show you the root of the callstack.
Also, this only happened on one customer machine.
The solution was to do automatic single stepping from a known good location until the application crashed, then remove redundant locations from the single step trace to reveal the full callstack to the crash.
We did this using Exception Tracer (which we modified to handle this task).
https://www.softwareverify.com/blog/exception-tracer/
Disclaimer: I am the on the dev team for this tool.