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How I Broke Grooveshark Lite – update

10 Dec

After some poking around and scratching our heads a bit, Katy and I were able to discover the source of the problem. Turns out what I hit is a compiler/language/optimization bug. Katy has more about it here, including the generic code we were able to distill it down to in order to cause the breakage.

We thought it was a permutation of this bug which is fixed, but apparently this is a new one, so we are going to file it.

I find it a bit disturbing that the related bug was brought to their attention in 2006 and the limited fix was only released to the general public 2 months ago. Over two years to release a fix to a language bug?!? From the comments on the bug, they do not seem to take it very seriously:

Fixed in the avmplus mainline. I’d suggest a 10.0 target date, since the change will need soaking time, there is a work-around and it is rare to encounter this problem.

Change 243008 by rreitmai@rickr-dev on 2006/09/08 12:37:23

Severity: important
Summary: Verifier error bugfix

Detailed Description:

An optimization in the verifier allows us to avoid checking for null in various circumstances. Unfortunately, we were being a little too aggressive and we missed a case. If a block is a target of a backwards branch then we need to assume upon entry of the block that no check has been performed.

The other way to fix this would be to emit null checks just prior to the branch for any values that have notNull true, but this could also create a bunch of unnecessary checks.

Aren’t obscure language bugs the absolute worst kind to have? In my case, it first went undetected because it didn’t trigger any errors/warnings with the debug version of flash (although our sample condensed code does), and then it was extremely difficult to track down because THE CODE WAS CORRECT, and when the production version of flash fails, it does so silently.

 

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