GC Bug R,ant

misc, personal

Shah B. and I have spent the last 3 weeks trying to resolve a segfault in our hex module. We’d been through it line by line, reduced the size of the game to deal with any memory errors and confirmed the validity of our initial hash. Clearly, the bug wasn’t in our code. After long discussions with the team leads and a final appeal to Dan, we were still unable to discover the source of the mysterious segmentation fault.

I came home after school today to do one final sweep of the code to look for the error. A couple passes with GDB modifying various little things turned up nothing, and I finally decided to recheck the hash setup.

To my horror, I discovered a single missing comma at the end of our pieces array in generic_hash_init.

3 weeks. Because of a comma.

GAAAAAHHHHHH!

Thinking about the loss of productivity makes me slightly nauseous, but I guess the whole situation’s pretty funny, or at least will be in retrospect.

Still, just one comma!