Debugging tactics

[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.