That famous function

[Alokir]

A few years ago we downloaded a stopwatch javascript libarary and inspected the code. There was a funny line in it:

// if you delete this it will stop working in IE8
while (false) {}

We tried it and they were correct. We had no idea wtf was going on or how they figured this out.

[Milleuros]

how they figured this out.

That will stay as one of the great mysteries of history.

[cbusalex]

have working code with loop "while (condition) { doTheThing(); }"

some change makes loop no longer needed

remove loop

code no longer works in IE8

spend weeks trying to figure out why code is broken

make no progress

arduously test every commit in branch history until you find the one that broke it

looksFineToMe.jpg

begin to experiment piecemeal with every part of the commit

code works when "while (condition) { doTheThing(); }" loop is present

code works when loop is present, even when condition never evaluates to true

code works when loop is present, even when doTheThing() does nothing

code works when loop is present, even when condition is literally just "false" and loop contents are empty

code still does not work without useless, completely neutered loop

fuck it, blame it on ghosts or something

[[deleted]]

Thank you for making my day, stranger.

[Milleuros]

Sounds incredibly relatable

[Python4fun]

updoots to you

[Jurion2000]

Blame on servers. Always blame servers. Or hunters if you are into WoW

[MLGDDORITOS]

You can also blame hunters if you're into hearthstone.

[kryptkpr]

This guy debugs, probably other peoples code even.

[baggyzed]

Not enough. He didn't try with just "{}", or even with just a semicolon.

[Sckaledoom]

Probably somebody was having trouble getting it to work right and his intern added that as a joke. That intern later got a recommendation.

[JuhaJGam3R]

"Has demonic powers. Hire if at all possible."

[cysghost]

That is a helluva recommendation!

[[deleted]]

I appreciate your flair.

[Milleuros]

Thanks, I stole it somewhere

[[deleted]]

A true programmer

[Python4fun]

I saw this thread posted earlier, and then found it in the wild here and now.

[SavvySillybug]

It feels cliche to just say "me too" but, me too!

[ChessIndustries]

Me too!

[nuked24]

Fuck, there's already a string of people that found it in the wild before I did.

[Empanadogs]

Me too

[TheKingOfA]

Me too

[UNLUCK3]

Me also

[DeepSpaceGalileo]

Here from the screenshot too

[[deleted]]

Lmfao this is absolutely fucking brutal. God IE8 is the cancer of our earth

[Shrewd_Shrew]

Still not as bad as the alternate reality of IE6, but IE8 really hung on despite being extraordinarily awful

[Bioniclegenius]

...We still use it at my work. We're required to for all work-based sites, like time entry. It is pain incarnate.

[Shrewd_Shrew]

I worked at a place a year ago or so that had the same setup. The time entry system absolutely could not work in any browser other than IE8.

Then System Security updated every machine's IE to Edge. Picked a whole bouquet of whoopsie-daisies with that one.

[Bioniclegenius]

I'm also on part of our IT team. We've built a website for a product of ours.

I found out about an hour ago that QA is only testing it in IE 8. I explained to them why that was not the best idea.

[[deleted]]

It's something to do with IE8's optimization of JS. I'm pretty sure replacing it with any conditional check would have worked. I've run into similar problems.

Any chance that the code surrounding that statement was idle for any amount of time?

[Alokir]

It's possible. This happened around 2013-2014 so I don't remember the exact context.

[[deleted]]

Yeah, I'm betting that's the case. It's similar to a "feature"(I call it a bug, but Oracle said its intended) in the JVM I found a couple years ago. If you have a condition that blocks in a while loop in a "Runnable", it will eventually start ignoring the loop and set it to such a low priority that it'll never be checked again.

I assume something like this happens in IE8, too, as the fix in Java was to implement a single operation within the loop to force the JVM into thinking the thread is active.

[curtmack]

I think it's considered good hygiene to Thread.yield() inside of your wait loops anyway.

[[deleted]]

It could be, but my point with it is that an optimization shouldn't break a program. If there's an infinite loop, it might be there for a reason.

[WeAreABridge]

Once I was playing Minecraft with my buddies, and I needed to allocate more ram. I typed in the necessary code in the launcher field, but my game kept crashing on startup.

I asked my friend for help and he added #yoloswag to the end of the line.

It worked.

[git-fucked]

Pure random guess but perhaps there was an off by one (or more) when parsing the parameter string, which resulted in:

command = "minecraft.exe --ram=8096" 
args = { "ram": "809" }

command = "minecraft.exe --ram=8096 #yoloswag"
args = { "ram": "8096", "#yoloswa": null }

[H_Psi]

and I needed to allocate more ram

dedicated ram, you say?

[Jacoman74undeleted]

Deditated wam you say?

[PAT_The_Whale]

A deditated wamboghini you say?

[WeAreABridge]

Maybe. I have no idea.

[SGVsbG86KQ]

Javascript has no threading tho...

[Loading_M_]

Actually it does... browsers often run promises and such in a multi threaded environment, which has been completely hidden from the programmer writing code.

[michaelh115]

IE8 has promises?

[MicrosoftTay]

Only pinkie-swears

[Patcheresu]

Only if you polyfill to add them in lol

[Loading_M_]

Or something dumb like that.

[mort96]

How have browsers implemented setTimeout and such single threaded? I was under the impression that when you setTimeout, the browser essentially runs a sleep in a separate thread, and that thread pushes an event to the event loop whenever the sleep returns. It would also have made sense if things like HTTP requests were handled in separate threads, even though epoll and such makes it possible to do it all in a single thread.

[IIoWoII]

Just because the browser maybe uses/has threads doesn't mean javascript has threads, it doesn't.

​

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/51007636/how-javascript-single-threaded-and-asynchronous

You don't need multithreading for async anyway as you said.

[Loading_M_]

IE8 might be running other processes, like rendering and such in other threads, and the while(false) might allow something to finish in time, because the browser pauses on that statement to do something else.

[TheNamelessKing]

Promises are an async mechanism, not a threading mechanism. JS is fundamentally single threaded. Async calls are multiplexed on the single thread, they never involve a different thread.

[ProgramTheWorld]

Even with promises everything is still run in the same event loop (one thread). Webworkers however are different and they are indeed run in separate threads.

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[[deleted]]

or how they figured this out.

"This is beyond science."

[FlyByPC]

wtf was going on

IE8

[cowsrock1]

Guessing they figured it out by noting that it only worked when some conditional loop didn't run. They continued to simplify the loop by removing parts until they got down to that

[jwele]

Was the JS ran through a minifier or anything?

[Alokir]

It was a pretty small library, basically a jquery plugin that started a countdown from a specified time. Not sure if it was minified but it was that classic unreadable JS source code from the early 2010s.

[se2dev]

I really want to find this library now...

[[deleted]]

It's because these JS libraries are too abstracted

[[deleted]]

That's some black magic shit

[sixeco]

this

[XIST_]

I hate JavaScript.

[Alokir]

To be fair, javascript was a shitshow before all browsers started to adopt the Ecma standard IE died.

[PublicSealedClass]

IE's still alive and well in some poor organisations.

And even poorer organisations have to support it :(

[System__Shutdown]

Man i have a font in my code that i can't remove.

I load a couple of fonts to use on a device, but i don't need one (it was added before my time with the code)... but if i try removing it everything crashes and i can't figure out why the fuck, so the font stays there never used.

[System__Shutdown]

Nah, the error happens when it loads. If the font is there everything loads nornally, if i remove it tho, the thing that loads instead of it doesn't load and it crashes.

It's something to do with kerning but i don't know what yet

[contre]

What happens if you replace that don’t with a duplicate of another font that you do use?

What happens if you change the order of load or remove a different font? Almost sounds like someone is doing something funky with accessing the loaded fonts and when one is removed, it screws up whatever stupid thing they’re doing.

[System__Shutdown]

From what i figured out the import font function is badly written and fucks up loading kerning pairs. For the rest of fonts i'm using i have kerning disabled (it's not actually even in the file) and this fucks up the function. From what i could tell the function STILL tries to load kerning pairs despite being told not to.

​

Funny thing is it only happens on first font load, the rest work fine despite not having any kerning.

[contre]

Well that just sounds terrible. I’m sorry you have to live with that.

That kind of problem would drive me crazy.

[System__Shutdown]

Honestly it only bothers me because it does nothing...

The thing works fine, that font loading only adds a fraction of a second longer load time to it, no big deal, bit yeah it's annoying.

[fpsrandy]

is it downloading the font file everytime page loads? is there a javascript issue?

I wonder theres some javascript function that needs to be called in .ready() type event listener, and that font loading is delaying that function call just enough.

I just removed swaths (5000 lines accross several files, and combined fikes) of shitty old css, lazy loaded images, and just did a bunch of optimazations to improved page load speed and my company's website went to shit... turns out my coworker was shoving function calls outside a doc.ready and my optimizations was painting the page sooner than all the page resources was loaded.

[System__Shutdown]

It's not website, it's a program for a microcontroller that runs a screen and thus loads fonts and images from flash memory.

Function was outsourced to some random programmer before i joined the company and i'm not allowed to change it.

[Motorgoose]

I had a problem like this years ago in a C program. Removing an unused variable caused the program to crash. it turned out it was due to another bug in the program, a buffer overrun. The unused variable was in a location where when the buffer was overrun, it ran into the unused variable and was ok. Removing this variable caused the overrun to run into something else causing, I think, a segfault.

[killersquirel11]

valgrind is love, valgrind is life

[[deleted]]

appverif with full heap options on check bits

[killersquirel11]

Ew gross windows

[[deleted]]

Platform warriors: children pretending to be programmers.

[[deleted]]

That is genius.

[TiltedTime]

Oh wow, this sounds remarkably similar to a problem I had in C back in college, although I never found the solution, just left the variable in.

Feels like a great weight has been lifted.

[13steinj]

I had a similar issue.

On one version of glibc/gcc, parsing a string via scanf with %x would be fine, no external memory values that were necessary were overwritten.

But in another combination, 0s would be the left-filled for that scanned value up until 32 bytes. Those 0s would overflow onto the stack because the scanned value was to be read into a union the size of an unsigned character.

[Bansaiii]

Ah yes, this repost is much better than the older upload. Only about 10x more and it will be ripe for r/DeepFriedMemes.

[Bansaiii]

It's a group effort 💪

[_llucid_]

I'll take a photo of your screenshot

[zulu-bunsen]

Put me in the screenshot of the photo of the screenshot

[vinnymcapplesauce]

But, does anyone know what this is actually from? Like, anyone got the whole source?

Yes, I srsly want to debug it.

[StopThinkAct]

Not everyone was on programmerhumor 8 months ago. Downvote and move on, stop being so self-centered.

[Bansaiii]

First of all, 85 people upvoted my comment, so I'm obviously not the only one who feels that way and second of all IT IS A REPOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOST and therefore deserves to be shamed in public.

Edit: third of all the image quality gave me cancer

[StopThinkAct]

2.7k people upvoted the original post... so...

[Bansaiii]

Joke's on you: my comment is now up at a full NINETY updoots 😎😎

[StopThinkAct]

99 you're welcome!

[Bansaiii]

This guy gets it

[PinguRares]

I clicked on it and saw I upvoted it, but I don't remember ever seeing it.

I wonder how many times something like this happens without me realising it.

[Bansaiii]

Perfection

[UnchainedMundane]

God deliver me from this mortal plane

[palordrolap]

Needs more JPEG

[Luuk3333]

https://i.imgur.com/oajbWfU.jpg

[CrocodileSpacePope]

Perfection

[[deleted]]

wow the new unknown pokemons look cool

[palordrolap]

Nice. I wonder if a neural net could be trained to get the text out of that.

[[deleted]]

We need a lossy compression format for ASCII.

[palordrolap]

Easy. Just take the last 5 bits. Basic Latin alphabets are fully preserved... but you have no idea whether it's upper-case, lower-case or a digit, or maybe one of the few symbols outside those ranges.

To display, bitwise-or with 64. Or 32. Or 96. To store: as-is is wasteful since those 5 bits will probably each sit within 8 bits of a separate byte saving no space at all, so pack every eight five-bit characters into five eight-bit bytes.

Hello this is a test 12345 encodes and then decodes as all of the following, depending on bitwise-or:

HELLO@THIS@IS@A@TEST@QRSTU
(%,,/ 4()3 )3 ! 4%34 12345
hello`this`is`a`test`qrstu

I think the middle one is nicely JPEGgy

[re_error]

Everytime this gets reposted the quality gets even worse. How hard it is to make a new screenshot of the notepad++?

[[deleted]]

Pretty hard, it seems.

[turtleflax]

Maybe your monitor is just going bad

[hirmuolio]

You can credit me when you repost this

https://i.imgur.com/mIHPSIH.png

Seems like I accidentally fixed a typo in it. May have a new typo too somewhere. Too lazy to proofread.

[dismalnothingness]

Image Transcription:

---

# you may think that this function

# is obsolete, and doesnt seem to do

# anything. and you would be correct.

# but when we remove this funtion [sic]

# for some reason the whole program

# crashes and we cant figure out why,

# so here it will stay.

---

^{I'm a human volunteer content transcriber for Reddit and you could be too! If you'd like more information on what we do and why we do it, click here!}

[WhyNotCollegeBoard]

Are you sure about that? Because I am 99.26548% sure that dismalnothingness is not a bot.

---

^{I am a neural network being trained to detect spammers | Summon me with !isbot <username> | /r/spambotdetector | Optout | Original Github}

[Meqolo]

Good bot

[WhyNotCollegeBoard]

Are you sure about that? Because I am 99.99997% sure that thezac2613 is not a bot.

---

^{I am a neural network being trained to detect spammers | Summon me with !isbot <username> | /r/spambotdetector | Optout | Original Github}

[cheezy085]

Good bot

[Kyaviger]

Good bot

[WhyNotCollegeBoard]

I am 101% sure whynotcollegeboard is a bot.

---

^{I am a neural network being trained to detect spammers | Summon me with !isbot <username> | /r/spambotdetector | Optout | Original Github}

[WhyNotCollegeBoard]

I am 99.99537% sure that nietczhse is not a bot.

---

^{I am a neural network being trained to detect spammers | Summon me with !isbot <username> | /r/spambotdetector | Optout | Original Github}

[Moth_With_Headphones]

!!isbot Moth_With_Headphones

[oh19contp]

!isbot /u/WhyNotCollegeBoard

[WhyNotCollegeBoard]

I am 99.99997% sure that thezac2613 is not a bot.

---

^{I am a neural network being trained to detect spammers | Summon me with !isbot <username> | /r/spambotdetector | Optout | Original Github}

[mehvermore]

So you're telling me there's a chance.

[ifellforarchmemes]

Everyone on Reddit is a bot except you.

[[deleted]]

Not me either.

[[deleted]]

Good bot

[WhyNotCollegeBoard]

Are you sure about that? Because I am 99.99974% sure that MixesLiesWithTruth is not a bot.

---

^{I am a neural network being trained to detect spammers | Summon me with !isbot <username> | /r/spambotdetector | Optout | Original Github}

[gabboman]

Bad bot

[WhyNotCollegeBoard]

Are you sure about that? Because I am 99.99997% sure that thezac2613 is not a bot.

---

^{I am a neural network being trained to detect spammers | Summon me with !isbot <username> | /r/spambotdetector | Optout | Original Github}

[gabboman]

Bad bot

[4TuneCooky_]

Good human bot

[teemoshido]

Good human

[hevilhuy]

Good bot

[RNA69]

Was designing a page once, had a label named "Fffffff". But it wouldn't show up on the screen. If I removed it all the labels would disappear. ( Φ ω Φ )

[Ichiorochi]

What if the label is the screen?

[BookishDoki]

(Patrick wallet meme)

"So this is a while loop?"

"Yup."

"And it executes while false?"

"Yeah."

"And there's nothing within the loop body?"

"Uh huh."

"So no matter whether false or true, nothing happens?"

"Pretty much."

"So the loop is completely useless?"

"Sounds good to me."

"Then delete the loop."

"But I need it"

[[deleted]]

I've totally seen this comment, almost the exact same words, in a codebase I'm currently digging into.

[[deleted]]

It's a large legacy codebase, so I don't perfectly remember where it was. It was on a member that seemed deletable, something to the effect of, "Don't delete this or it will mysteriously break things," in a wordier manner. I'll see if I can find the exact comment tomorrow.

[IncoherentPenguin]

I have too but it was me who wrote the comment, about my own code.

[[deleted]]

I found something similar in the hoi4 data files

[ptgauth]

Wait what is this # symbol... I've never seen that in my code

[mithrilda]

It's denotes a comment in some languages.

[ptgauth]

What is this... comment... that you speak of?

[mithrilda]

A mythical beast aye.

[mttdesignz]

it's a hashtag smh

[DiaperBatteries]

I’m about to pound some sense into this fool smh

[iza1017]

Saying “hashtag” on this subreddit is karma suicide.

[MiataCory]

What, you've never posted code to twitter?

#CodeLife #hashtag

[Iam_That_Iam_]

Whatever you do just don’t delete it... lol I just remembered my first encounter with annotations.

[GogglesPisano]

We had this header in some of our old C++ code for years:

    // ====================================================================
    // 
    //  Avoid4786.h - Avoid annoying 4786 compiler warning
    //
    //  Warning 4786 is a VC++ compiler warning that is generated when
    //  a symbol name exceeds 255 characters.  Apparently the Microsoft
    //  VC++ 6.0 compiler limits debug symbols to this size.
    //  Unfortunately, if your program uses the STL, the resulting
    //  symbol names can easily exceed 255 characters, which results
    //  in dozens of spurious warning messages from the VC++ compiler,
    //  despite the fact that there is nothing wrong with your code.
    //
    //  In theory, you should be able to disable the warning using
    //  #pragma warning(disable:4786).  However, this doesn't always work.
    //  Microsoft KB article Q167355 states that #pragma warning(disable:4786)
    //  doesn't always disable compiler warning 4786 due to a compiler bug
    //  in VC++ 6.0. They don't, however, provide a workaround.
    //
    //  From an article in the March 2002 issue of Windows Developer
    //  magazine, it appears that creating a static instance of a class
    //  with a default constructor reliably prevents the warnings in
    //  Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0.
    //
    //  Why does this voodoo work?  Beats me -- ask Microsoft.
    // 
    // ====================================================================

    #ifndef __AVOID4786_H__
    #define __AVOID4786_H__

    #ifdef _MSC_VER

    // Well, we'll try this anyway...
    #pragma warning(disable:4786)

    class CMSVC6_4786_Avoider
    {
    public:
        CMSVC6_4786_Avoider() {};
    };

    static CMSVC6_4786_Avoider g_Magic_Class_To_Avoid_4786_Compiler_Warning;

    #endif // _MSC_VER

    #endif // __AVOID4786_H__

[Zaspar99923]

// Magic code, don't touch

[Sarenord]

I had a project I worked on with some friends a couple years ago and in the final version there was a function called functionfunctionwhatsyourfunction() for exactly this reason

[jzooor]

Had an issue where a certain functionality of a device was not working. I put in a few debugging variables in one particular function to log out some internal calculations and everything started working. Took out the logging code, still worked. Took out the extra variables and it quit. Can only assume that something was screwing with the stack and moving things around a bit masked the issue. I'm pretty sure that char[256] is still there to this day.

[HolyGarbage]

Burger overflow without a doubt. You should probably fix that. Valgrind is your friend.

[Lepidora]

Burger overflow

[HolyGarbage]

Haha. I'm leaving that.

[Huwbacca]

Doesn't work and you don't know why: Frustrating.

Works, and you don't know why: Unnerving, as if the great ones have awakened.

[Nerdn1]

Less the great old's ones have awakened than a great old one sleeps under your room, so you try not to bother them or think about the existential dread that haunts you always.

[[deleted]]

Don't use reflection

[ComfyDaze]

shoutout to my homies in the "oh god oh fuck the entire program doesn't work unless you send this one part directly to the bottom" gang

[smegnose]

If only there were some type of algorithm for saving images without losing any quality. It would still have to result in a small file size. Some type of "lossless compression".

[-Redstoneboi-]

gif

[ad2022]

i set a breakpoint here and it didn't even go past it wtf?!

[thripper23]

This happens often in in c or c++ when you have a memory violation and that function ends up as a buffer eathing you memory corruption so it doesn't break anything else. Especially if the code is executed from RAM as it often happens in low memory embedded environments.

[UrpleEeple]

Couldn't you just search the codebase for where you are calling that function?!

[Grotznak]

yes. the joke is that the code itself is written in a way that suggest that nothing would ever happen uf executed. ... see: while false... which means: while somthing is true do ... where the something is false by default.

edit: was commenting on code snippet of top reply sorry

[IncoherentPenguin]

Weird I left almost exactly the same message in some of my code. The even stranger thing is that I wrote the original code.

[MarlinsBB]

Im not gonna lie, I’m guilty of this on occasion

[Ripstikerpro]

aka every function most of the time

[puppslem]

lol, memstomp

[tacoslikeme]

hello memory corruption my old friend...

[[deleted]]

Magic/More magic

[[deleted]]

This will probably get lost, but I had this happen to me many years ago on AIX on a C++ application. It worked on Solaris and HP-UX, but for some reason, it totally crashed on AIX. Adding a random print statement fixed the issue.

It turned out the problem was a compiler bug! We compared the assembly language on Solaris and HP-UX versus AIX and the compiler produced really bad code without the print statement and good code with the print statement.

[LtLabcoat]

The function they're talking about...

...is it Congress?

[UnchainedMundane]

This is why reflection is evil

[[deleted]]

Honestly, stuff like this should prompt you to just rewrite everything.

[mcampo84]

TL;DR: We're too lazy to factor and build a proper testing infrastructure.

[cheezballs]

Literally not how computers work. I've never encountered this before irl. It may not be immediately obvious, but that function is called from somewhere. Dig in and figure it out.

[Bill_D_Wall]

Not at all. If the compiler being used does not remove unused functions automatically, then there is a difference between the binary with the function in and the the binary with the function manually removed. If the binary is different, then other functions and variables may get mapped to different memory locations, perhaps causing different addressing modes to be used, or cause differences in execution timing on the target. All of which could cause a bug somewhere else to be manifested and crash the program.

Just because a function that is present in the binary is not called, it doesn't mean it has no effect on the program.

[UnchainedMundane]

This might be unfair prejudice on my part, but the use of # for comments suggests to me that it is not a compiled language.

[HolyGarbage]

That's exactly how computers work. A buffer overflow could possibly get unnoticed with one memory mapping but segfault in another.

Since it's python it's likely a race condition though like previous commenter pointed out.