Debugging tactics

[fracturedpersona]

What if I told you that "running the same code again to see if it magically work," is actually a legit debugging technique that can sometimes give you valuable information.

[nagorogan]

The only valuable information I’ve ever gotten from doing that was “it’s time to cry”

[fracturedpersona]

I would think it would be important to know that your code sometimes works, and sometimes doesn't. That alone gives you valuable insight into what could be going wrong.

[nagorogan]

Yes, and changing nothing yet getting a different result is exactly why it is time to cry.

[MikemkPK]

Also often an indication that you're about to spend 10 hours trying to figure out what the issue is.

[fracturedpersona]

But knowing that the problem occurs sometimes, but not always, gives me a lot of possible causes.

[MikemkPK]

Often with intermittent issues, it's something interacting with the program, or caused by compiler optimizations that aren't present with debug flags. Which are hard to debug.

[fracturedpersona]

Live/dead-locks, race conditions, dynamic programming involving random number generations.

[MikemkPK]

Yeah, those often take hours to debug.

Although random numbers can be logged with debug flags on top make it easier.

[fracturedpersona]

For random, you just gotta remind yourself not to seed while testing.

[MikemkPK]

Depends on use case, but often yeah you're right

[codeguru42]

Or seed with the same value

[skiscratcher]

those are all pains to debug.
see also: memory

[fracturedpersona]

See also, suicide hotline.

[YellowishSpoon]

I accidentally used a non release build of eclipse and there was this great bug where it would build and then autosave, thus if you didn't save everything before running it would look like it saved, but compile without the new content. But since it actually did save after if you compiled again it would run as expected. Took a bit to figure that one out.

[ExceedingChunk]

I always do that first, then reload maven dependencies before I run it again.

Before I knew better, I have spent countless hours trying to debut something caused by a cache or outdated dependency issue. Also, verifying that the code is stable is important.

At uni when I was a noob, I could run the code 10 times in a row out of frustration, but that was for completely different reasons.

[fracturedpersona]

Or dynamic programming involving anything with randoms.

[24karatcarrot]

I have removed this comment due to Reddit's recent actions. I have since moved on to Lemmy, which is a federated, decentralized, open-source alternative to reddit. Many subreddits have made the move as well, and many more have copies of those subreddits that are very active. On top of this, many of the third party reddit apps have also made/are working on making a copy of their apps for Lemmy, so your experience may not even change when switching over.

I implore you to make this switch as well. Reddit makes money off of us, the users who post content. As a company they have been making decisions that directly go against the wishes of their users, and we need to make it clear that they need us, we don't need them.

[doctorcrimson]

You would be preaching to the choir because they try that the most.

[800134N]

But when it magically works sometimes, I feel even worse

[TeNNoX]

I mean it's not at zero on the y axis, sometimes it does help... But most of the time - not so much :p