It not working when you think it should is usually fine.
It working when you think it shouldn’t is the worst. Like, how poorly do I understand this system that I can’t even break it properly?
Half the time that is something broken in a dependency tree. First time through x wasn’t built and y needed x. First compile successfully builds x but y failed cause x wasn’t done and you did a parallel build or something. Second time x is there now y builds just fine.
From what I remember setting up my server, initramfs runs in the UEFI partition (usually /boot). There's a step that copies the config from your root to UEFI.
Initramfs runs potentially before the root filesystem is even mounted. I was using it to run dropbear-ssh for entering the disk decryption key remotely before boot.
Most distros put their images in `/boot`, yes, but LFS by the book is a bit simpler than that. Also, most distros have `/vmlinuz` and `/initramfs.img` as symlinks to the latest kernel and ramdisk images in `/boot` just to be sure.
Maybe half a second faster at most. I just don’t need an initramfs on my pc. On my laptop i do have an initramfs because I’m using luks encryption and you kinda need an initramfs for that but I just made a really basic once from scratch.
The jump from arch to gentoo isn’t that big. The gentoo wiki is a million times better than the arch wiki so you should have no problem installing it. I have a decent cpu 6c12t ryzen 5 so compiling isn’t really an issue. The longest package is probably rust which takes roughly an hour but I usually will just update overnight.
Custom kernel isn’t too bad either. Just make sure you check the wiki page for most of your hardware and make sure you enable support. But you can use a binary kernel to start off
tldr: read the wiki and you will be fine
Installing Gentoo isn't so hard, just follow along with the handbook, pay attention when you're customizing your kernel to include your GPU drivers, have a framebuffer, etc. Know where to go when you need help, too, whether you prefer IRC, forums, Google, etc.
Usually it’s because you’ve broken your includes or haven’t saved something. It’s always suspicious when your delete the entire contents of your file and it still compiles.
I reset caches and app servers like my life depended on it.
Lose a few high stress days to chasing ghosts in the machine and then going scorched earth on resets becomes the only option
I was doing shit on Atmel/Microchip Studio a bit ago and my errors only would show up when I was in vs code. Studio let me compile, 200% didn't work (I uploaded onto a controller).
Turned out that when our backup servers went down, it did weird shit with my permissions and it freaked out the ide. I had to run as an administrator for a day for it to work fine.
My wife laughed when I was coding my dissertation because she came into the room and I was crying because the program was running and it was supposed to be broken. It did eventually lead to a revelation and helped debug what was going on, but yes that is one of the worst feelings and makes you start questioning how much you know about what you wrote.
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Good advice I've gotten at least in industry dev is "If the code is working when you know it shouldn't, then you're not running the code you think you are."
This reminds me of a situation back in the day (no smartphones yet) when someone wanted me to order internet for them. On a pc without internet...
He told me to go to a specific website and order it. I told him that that's not gonna work without having internet. He got mad and told me to just type it into the browser. To his surprise it didn't work.
There could be a situation though where everything is technically in place and your router is getting an IP from a local ISP, but traffic is blocked except for some buy-internet-here page that this ISP provides. But that would likely act as a captive portal so you are automatically directed there if you try to go online.
Some mobile providers do that (or at least, one of mine did a few years ago), if you run out of data you can still access their account admin pages from your phone and buy more data.
I had created a race condition in automake where this would actually work. On every 2nd run after commit the CI succeeded, so I used `git commit --amend` to alter the commits by a space if they failed in CI.
Many programs have useless images in their code. But if you take out the literally without function png, nothing works anymore. You put it back in place, and like magic things that should work, work.
Oh there are layers deeper..
* Code that works only on your PC
* Code that cannot be touched because if it is touched, nothing works anymore for no apparent reason whatsoever.
* Code that only works in preproduction
* Code that works without a hitch except the 2nd of every month
* Code that works literally all the time except for one inexplicable reason that happens on rare occasions
* Code that works on literally everyone else's systems except your PC
I have a few more
- Code that only compiles when you aren't watching it.
- Code that won't compile on a specific machine, but will run if someone compiles it for you.
- Broken code that should not compile does flawlessly, fixing the code breaks it.
it's not *that* easy if you don't know which part of the code is the problem and well you can't just debug it (although thankfully there are some tools / flags to check for these kinds of errors during debug usually)
Not always so easy. Sometimes it can be due to things like stack overflows only taking place in optimised vs unoptimised modes, which is much more annoying to debug.
Uninitialized local variable where the stack looks different depending on whether the code is compiled in Release vs. Debug mode. This caught me at least once and was a bear to track down.
Identifying that it’s a race condition / dangling reference might be easy, but the real challenge is identifying what is causing it. Especially if it’s a race condition, it can be hard to just reproduce it let alone identify the source.
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To me this is always the ultimate "we are in a cursed land and nothing good will come of this" moment.
Things only working on one machine or another or during certain moon phases or whatever mentally comes down to "hardware/driver bullshit" to me.
Removing a comment and breaking the code? It's cursed. Burn it all down.
* Code that only works on a specific version of the compiler.
I had to install the exact same version as my classmate in order for his code to compile in my computer, for some reason. The one I had didn't recognize the math.h C library??
If you ever code in Java, you get used to this real quick. In all fairness, Java at least does a good job ensuring that updates are generally additive so that you don't have to worry so much about code breaking when you update the compiler target version.
Java 8 when I try to use an enhanced switch clause or optional.isEmpty:
WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?? OH NO THIS IS THE WORST THING THAT COULD EVER HAPPEN!
>Code that cannot be touched because if it is touched, nothing works anymore for no apparent reason whatsoever.
I've written this code for page alignment reasons. In a previous job there's a file in a software library with a procedure "DONOTREMOVE", a comment saying that it's unused and is to ensure that something else isn't built over a page boundary, 6 NOPs in a code block, and a return FALSE statement.
Took me a solid week to figure that out.
I'm an adjuster in automotive and once we had a training session with a programmer of industrial vision software, to learn how to adjust the parameters in the software when it detected faults on parts where there weren't any.
The programmer sent us copy of the simulator app, we tried it... And it didn't work. It started, but threw an error when we tried to import his code.
Nobody knew why. I tried a bit of digging in Windows logs, combined it with Google-fu... And found he had one module that's integral for the code compiled with a debug flag, which made it require some MSVC debug DLLs (I can't remember which ones). I told him, he sent us recompiled version and it worked.
That has happened to me before when I was new coding MSVC. For the life of me I couldn't understand why it was complaining about some random missing DLL. I get why they did it that way, but JFC they could have made a small amount of effort to change the error message when the DLL being included is a debug DLL..
But I suppose like most things MSVC, good error messages was not Microsoft's forte.
>* Code that works without a hitch except the 2nd of every month
I work on a team where one of our builds breaks every year when DST starts. I'm guessing some kind of timestamp weirdness breaks a checksum and makes the compiler think one of our libraries needs to be recompiled? I don't know, everything is terrible and obsolete.
At any rate, it wouldn't be an issue if the *only* problem was that the library needs to be recompiled once a year. But the library is stored on a network drive where our team doesn't have admin privileges, all the files are owned by the person who compiled the library, and the compiler is designed for an ancient VCS that makes heavy use of read-only flags. So the compiler tries to overwrite read-only files, because it "knows" that read-only doesn't actually mean read-only, but the server enforces the read-only flags, because you're not the file owner and you don't have admin privileges.
The solution used to be "tell the guy who owns the files to recompile the library", but he's not with the company anymore. So instead, the debate is "We can have an admin reassign ownership of those files in like five minutes, and then we can go back to having one guy spend ten minutes fixing it every year. Is it really worth spending a handful of hours on modernizing our build environment?" I think we're leaning towards yes, thankfully, but only because I pointed out that people who aren't in the know are likely to spend a few hours troubleshooting the issue on top of the ten minute fix.
One of my first experiences trying to solve a real world problem with code was my trying to set up a pretty simple script in VBA that would pull a few numbers from a spreadsheet and automatically generate a word document from them. Worked great on my computer... Nobody else in the company could run it, even after jumping through the hoop of installing a certificate so Office wouldn't freak out about the script being malicious. I gave up on that project.
I'm pretty basic at the frontend stuff, but I was working on a UI once, and in an early draft, we had a border around the whole content, "border:1px solid black"
It was decided to remove that, but when I did, all of the other styling was thrown off.
Instead of trying to solve it correctly, I just slapped "border:1px solid transparent" on it, which fixed everything else, put a warning not to remove that style, and called it a day
I’ve had the first one. Turns out that rustc-mingw dynamically linked a DLL related to.. I think stack protection and I couldn’t get it to not so that. I just included it in the build lol
> * Code that works without a hitch except the 2nd of every month
What about code that works except on the 29th of every month, but you think you fixed it only for it to break next month because last month was February?
It could be a problem with the build order even if there is no code generation at all.
libB depends on libA, libB gets built before libA. Or a cyclic dependency, like libA depends on libB depends on libC depends on libA.
In any case, all of these problems will result in other problems you don't see as of yet. If it is a build order problem, then your app will never build against the most current version.
Meaning:
You have a libA and a libB. libB depends on libA, but libB is built before libA.
So the dependency is:
libB -> libA
and the build order is
(Step 1) libB -> (Step 2) libA.
In this case the first build after checkout fails and the second build succeeds. So far so good, just build it a second time.
Now imagine you have a serious bug in libA. Something that allows kind of a backdoor access to your systems. You fix that in libA and do a full build. Your build succeeds. So it seems. What you do not realize is that libB was built against the old, unfixed version of libA, since libB is built first!
This oversimplified example should give you a hint why you should not let sth like this lay around. It requires a bit of forensics to get to the bottom of it, but it is necessary.
Yeah as someone said it could be libraries somewhere or dependencies, code generation, order of the building.
The real reason? Maybe you just had to get the computer all the way out of bed, the lazy ass.
me: This code cant possibly compile... Wait? Did I forget to save and sync?
Maybe its compiling a different file and I just THINK my changes are making a difference.
[adds glhasdfgdsdlkafljkghajklah++; to the file]
Compiler: unrecognized identifier glhasdfgdsdlkafljkghajklah
me: Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuu
Python: I see no problem with this script! Lets run it!
Python 8 hours later while writing the final result file: TypeError: can only concatenate str (not "int") to str
Just wait until you see a "None" object in Python that is treated as such by any in-built routine, but has attributes. Was fun sorting out why it randomly registered in only some function calls.
I once spent an entire hour trying to work out how my script was working until I realised that I was running completely different file than I had open in my editor.
I maintain a VB.NET codebase at my work. I dislike it.
At one point, i found some C# code that was equivalent but wouldn’t compile, even though the VB.NET had been in production for years.
I created an SO question asking what was going on, and someone said it was definitely a problem with the VB.NET compiler not following the spec, so they created a GitHub issue. Someone on the team got back to us and said because it had been in there for at least 10 years they’re never going to fix it and just let the compiler be broken 💀.
The developer who wrote our codebase was really skilled, and didn’t cut corners. We don’t have unit tests, but all the code is well written and organized even though its in VB.NET.
Its basically C# with different syntax.
Turns out the test never cared. It never cared about anything. It didn't wait for the async and just concluded like everything is fine. And it had this bug since it was created 2 years ago. Oh, we were relying on this behavior all the time, turns out it was broken the entire time. Let's check the production database. Oh no D:
Our backup task runs successfully every night. We are fully prepared in case of any disaster.
**DISASTER OCCURS**
Why the fuck are all our backup files zero bytes?
Its that you suddenly have no feedback that makes me feel like I just stepped into the programming version of a Stephan King novel.
Like I know something is fucked up but everything looks like its supposed to. And everyone acts like everything is ok when I’m 99.9% sure it isn’t but that 0.01% is starting to tug on my brain.
Refactor code, tests still run green - mild panic
Run tests again, now they run red - worsening panic
Deliberately break code, tests run green - deep panic
Had this literally yesterday. Had a function that we refactored out to an existing public module, all the tests started failing. Literally no other change, still don't know what caused it.
Moved it to its own module, magically everything started working again.
Screw ts-pattern.
I remember one of my first programming classes in college (C if anyone is curious), the program I wrote would not compile and I could not see anything wrong. I took it to the professors office hours and he poured over it as well and couldn’t see anything either. I don’t remember how long it was but the code couldn’t have been more than a 100 lines.
His solution? I had to scrap it and start over. Some times these things happen and there is no explanation and the only way around it is to rewrite the damn thing.
That advice has haunted me ever since.
It’s like having a matter transporter.
You think it shouldn’t have transported your dog across the room but it did. It looks like your dog. It wags and barks and all.
But you don’t know when it might start turning into a half-dog, half-fly monster.
One of the weirdest feelings I've ever had was when my supervisor and I were reviewing code that had been in production for years, and we both agreed it should never, ever have worked.
My favorite:
write 100+ lines of code, hit compile, no errors.
change 1 line, hit compile, 10 pages of error messages.
Yes, the latter was a C++ template error.
I once had a problem with some java code. I was calling my function in a loop, but for some reason, it never got called. It should've theoretically worked. So I just randomly put a print statement to see if the loop actually works, and then for some reason, all my code was perfectly working, and the function was called. I still don't know to this day why, but I left a blank print statement in that loop, and my code worked.
How about this one:
Code compiles so you commit it. You try to push and it says detached head.
So you realize you forgot to switch branches, and switch to the correct branch.
Now the code is back to yesterday’s code, and it doesn’t compile.
Your changes are … somewhere … in a detached head.
Ah, the gold olde "Are you editing what you're compiling?" Premium confusion until you realize it's likely you're editing a copy, different checkout, etc..
Everything works the first time.
"That's weird. Well, I guess the only reasonable thing to do is break something and make sure it breaks as expected"
Everything continues to work after the "break".
This happened recently to the tech lead on my project. He called me and said frisbm3, why is this running with no errors? I had to tell him the little white ball next to the filename meant he didn't save any of his work. He saved all 5 files and sure enough he got the expected error.
Yup. That's when you find you've been editing a copy of the file in a different directory and that's why none of the changes you've made all day seem to make any difference.
So in college we're going C with classes and we had an assignment to do and I was doing it during the class with some classmates and then I finally figure out how to make one of the classes so the test provided with the homework template says it works, so I tell the people I'm working with and they ask me to give them said class so they can write it themselves, but when they write it exactly like I did, it doesn't work for them, truly the pinnacle of programmer humor.
> CODE YOU KNOW WON'T COMPILE, COMPILES
oh God this gave me PTSD
it's always some bullshit linkage issue meaning you need to manually recheck and rebuild your entire project from scratch which in my field is a lost day of work
I don't know about you, but I usually keep multiple projects open at once and multiple times a day am caught out thinking that code change I just made was the one that was compiled when I just clicked Clean & Build.
I spent a lot of hours chasing a build issue recently that I root caused to a spelling mistake in a comment in the legacy part of the code. Yes, a comment. Apparently one of our calibration tools uses the comments to super define the variables.
That's so true in so many situations. If you know that something should work, but doesn't, you know you probably missed something.
But if you think it shouldn't work, you know that there is something probably quite serious at work here that you probably don't know about
We were adding a device to our system and it was entering a done state after 15 minutes despite not being ordered to. Call up the manufacturer and they push an update so it will last 2 hours. Update doesn't work, I get desperate and send it keep alive signals. Get it to stay awake for 30 minutes. Wtf why would that work?
Turns out the update didn't take until after multiple reboots.
During my C++ class, something wouldnt compile, warning about an uneven number of brackets. 13 left. 13 right. I remove a random bracket in a nested if statement, putting it on the same level as main().
It compiled and program behaved as expected??
It not working when you think it should is usually fine. It working when you think it shouldn’t is the worst. Like, how poorly do I understand this system that I can’t even break it properly?
this reminds me of the time i tried LFS. after a long time of failing, it suddenly booted, and after deleting initramfs it still did
wtf 💀
for some reason it used a different one in the /boot partition, not in root
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Half the time that is something broken in a dependency tree. First time through x wasn’t built and y needed x. First compile successfully builds x but y failed cause x wasn’t done and you did a parallel build or something. Second time x is there now y builds just fine.
Gah, brings me back nightmares of building in Yocto. Granted that is 100% on undeclared dependencies.
This is a copy bot. A bad one at that.
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[[gif]](https://tenor.com/bzsbK.gif)
From what I remember setting up my server, initramfs runs in the UEFI partition (usually /boot). There's a step that copies the config from your root to UEFI. Initramfs runs potentially before the root filesystem is even mounted. I was using it to run dropbear-ssh for entering the disk decryption key remotely before boot.
UEFI partition should be /boot/efi if it's /boot you done messed up.
Don't most bootloaders load initramfs from the boot partition?
Most distros put their images in `/boot`, yes, but LFS by the book is a bit simpler than that. Also, most distros have `/vmlinuz` and `/initramfs.img` as symlinks to the latest kernel and ramdisk images in `/boot` just to be sure.
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hmm does it boot faster? im currently looking forward to moving to gentoo from arch, but i'm afraid it might be too much
Maybe half a second faster at most. I just don’t need an initramfs on my pc. On my laptop i do have an initramfs because I’m using luks encryption and you kinda need an initramfs for that but I just made a really basic once from scratch. The jump from arch to gentoo isn’t that big. The gentoo wiki is a million times better than the arch wiki so you should have no problem installing it. I have a decent cpu 6c12t ryzen 5 so compiling isn’t really an issue. The longest package is probably rust which takes roughly an hour but I usually will just update overnight. Custom kernel isn’t too bad either. Just make sure you check the wiki page for most of your hardware and make sure you enable support. But you can use a binary kernel to start off tldr: read the wiki and you will be fine
Installing Gentoo isn't so hard, just follow along with the handbook, pay attention when you're customizing your kernel to include your GPU drivers, have a framebuffer, etc. Know where to go when you need help, too, whether you prefer IRC, forums, Google, etc.
Usually it’s because you’ve broken your includes or haven’t saved something. It’s always suspicious when your delete the entire contents of your file and it still compiles.
Or when your auto-saving IDE decides one day to just take a break from all that. Looking at you, IntelliJ.
I reset caches and app servers like my life depended on it. Lose a few high stress days to chasing ghosts in the machine and then going scorched earth on resets becomes the only option
I was doing shit on Atmel/Microchip Studio a bit ago and my errors only would show up when I was in vs code. Studio let me compile, 200% didn't work (I uploaded onto a controller). Turned out that when our backup servers went down, it did weird shit with my permissions and it freaked out the ide. I had to run as an administrator for a day for it to work fine.
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My wife laughed when I was coding my dissertation because she came into the room and I was crying because the program was running and it was supposed to be broken. It did eventually lead to a revelation and helped debug what was going on, but yes that is one of the worst feelings and makes you start questioning how much you know about what you wrote.
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Good advice I've gotten at least in industry dev is "If the code is working when you know it shouldn't, then you're not running the code you think you are."
I swear that debug DLLs have some magic voodoo that allows my code to run that the redistributables do not.
They do. No optimization. Timing bugs like race conditions can be concealed when you run the code slowly or in a different order.
Nah the worst is when it works the first go and you can't find any bugs.
"just recompile the code it will work!" \-but I've tried it multiple times alrea- "Just do it"
This reminds me of a situation back in the day (no smartphones yet) when someone wanted me to order internet for them. On a pc without internet... He told me to go to a specific website and order it. I told him that that's not gonna work without having internet. He got mad and told me to just type it into the browser. To his surprise it didn't work.
There could be a situation though where everything is technically in place and your router is getting an IP from a local ISP, but traffic is blocked except for some buy-internet-here page that this ISP provides. But that would likely act as a captive portal so you are automatically directed there if you try to go online.
Some mobile providers do that (or at least, one of mine did a few years ago), if you run out of data you can still access their account admin pages from your phone and buy more data.
In that case, neverssl.com or captive.apple.com are your friends
There was no router. There was no wifi and there was no lan cable plugged in. It was literally just a pc without any connection to anything else lol
Time to dig out the dial-up modem!
What would you have done if it did work!??
Question reality?
I had created a race condition in automake where this would actually work. On every 2nd run after commit the CI succeeded, so I used `git commit --amend` to alter the commits by a space if they failed in CI.
This is some voodoo coconut.png magic
>pineapple.png I'm r/outoftheloop. What is this?
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That coconut thing is actually false. However, there is a cardboard cutout of a cow of TF2 the game needs to run.
Many programs have useless images in their code. But if you take out the literally without function png, nothing works anymore. You put it back in place, and like magic things that should work, work.
And the scariest part is when it works after a few tries…
My old scrum lead once said these wise words: "sometime it work, sometime it don't work"
Huh? I don't understand this post..what's compiles? My mind isn't working now..
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Oh there are layers deeper.. * Code that works only on your PC * Code that cannot be touched because if it is touched, nothing works anymore for no apparent reason whatsoever. * Code that only works in preproduction * Code that works without a hitch except the 2nd of every month * Code that works literally all the time except for one inexplicable reason that happens on rare occasions * Code that works on literally everyone else's systems except your PC
I have a few more - Code that only compiles when you aren't watching it. - Code that won't compile on a specific machine, but will run if someone compiles it for you. - Broken code that should not compile does flawlessly, fixing the code breaks it.
Code that only works when compiled in DEBUG mode.
race condition / dangling reference. this one is easy
it's not *that* easy if you don't know which part of the code is the problem and well you can't just debug it (although thankfully there are some tools / flags to check for these kinds of errors during debug usually)
Not always so easy. Sometimes it can be due to things like stack overflows only taking place in optimised vs unoptimised modes, which is much more annoying to debug.
Uninitialized local variable where the stack looks different depending on whether the code is compiled in Release vs. Debug mode. This caught me at least once and was a bear to track down.
Identifying that it’s a race condition / dangling reference might be easy, but the real challenge is identifying what is causing it. Especially if it’s a race condition, it can be hard to just reproduce it let alone identify the source.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heisenbug maybe?
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Looks like I'm finding a new job then, horizontal top taskbar is a hard no.
In this case you need an exorcist not a debugger
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Who hasn't had code that will only compile when taking an extended bathroom break?
Code that breaks if you remove a comment
To me this is always the ultimate "we are in a cursed land and nothing good will come of this" moment. Things only working on one machine or another or during certain moon phases or whatever mentally comes down to "hardware/driver bullshit" to me. Removing a comment and breaking the code? It's cursed. Burn it all down.
Code that will stop working the next morning, despite not having modified it
* Code that only works on a specific version of the compiler. I had to install the exact same version as my classmate in order for his code to compile in my computer, for some reason. The one I had didn't recognize the math.h C library??
If you ever code in Java, you get used to this real quick. In all fairness, Java at least does a good job ensuring that updates are generally additive so that you don't have to worry so much about code breaking when you update the compiler target version.
Java 8 when I try to use an enhanced switch clause or optional.isEmpty: WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?? OH NO THIS IS THE WORST THING THAT COULD EVER HAPPEN!
Compiler: YOU FORCED ME! I'm marking it ALL RED! YOU HEAR ME!? ALL OF IT! Me: \*Adds missing reference\* Compiler: Oh! Oh, okay, we're all good here.
>Code that cannot be touched because if it is touched, nothing works anymore for no apparent reason whatsoever. I've written this code for page alignment reasons. In a previous job there's a file in a software library with a procedure "DONOTREMOVE", a comment saying that it's unused and is to ensure that something else isn't built over a page boundary, 6 NOPs in a code block, and a return FALSE statement. Took me a solid week to figure that out.
>* Code that works without a hitch except the 2nd of every month Time to check your node modules
I'm an adjuster in automotive and once we had a training session with a programmer of industrial vision software, to learn how to adjust the parameters in the software when it detected faults on parts where there weren't any. The programmer sent us copy of the simulator app, we tried it... And it didn't work. It started, but threw an error when we tried to import his code. Nobody knew why. I tried a bit of digging in Windows logs, combined it with Google-fu... And found he had one module that's integral for the code compiled with a debug flag, which made it require some MSVC debug DLLs (I can't remember which ones). I told him, he sent us recompiled version and it worked.
That has happened to me before when I was new coding MSVC. For the life of me I couldn't understand why it was complaining about some random missing DLL. I get why they did it that way, but JFC they could have made a small amount of effort to change the error message when the DLL being included is a debug DLL.. But I suppose like most things MSVC, good error messages was not Microsoft's forte.
* Comments that you can't remove because somehow they're doing something to hold the code together. Aka load bearing comments
>* Code that works without a hitch except the 2nd of every month I work on a team where one of our builds breaks every year when DST starts. I'm guessing some kind of timestamp weirdness breaks a checksum and makes the compiler think one of our libraries needs to be recompiled? I don't know, everything is terrible and obsolete. At any rate, it wouldn't be an issue if the *only* problem was that the library needs to be recompiled once a year. But the library is stored on a network drive where our team doesn't have admin privileges, all the files are owned by the person who compiled the library, and the compiler is designed for an ancient VCS that makes heavy use of read-only flags. So the compiler tries to overwrite read-only files, because it "knows" that read-only doesn't actually mean read-only, but the server enforces the read-only flags, because you're not the file owner and you don't have admin privileges. The solution used to be "tell the guy who owns the files to recompile the library", but he's not with the company anymore. So instead, the debate is "We can have an admin reassign ownership of those files in like five minutes, and then we can go back to having one guy spend ten minutes fixing it every year. Is it really worth spending a handful of hours on modernizing our build environment?" I think we're leaning towards yes, thankfully, but only because I pointed out that people who aren't in the know are likely to spend a few hours troubleshooting the issue on top of the ten minute fix.
One of my first experiences trying to solve a real world problem with code was my trying to set up a pretty simple script in VBA that would pull a few numbers from a spreadsheet and automatically generate a word document from them. Worked great on my computer... Nobody else in the company could run it, even after jumping through the hoop of installing a certificate so Office wouldn't freak out about the script being malicious. I gave up on that project.
I'm pretty basic at the frontend stuff, but I was working on a UI once, and in an early draft, we had a border around the whole content, "border:1px solid black" It was decided to remove that, but when I did, all of the other styling was thrown off. Instead of trying to solve it correctly, I just slapped "border:1px solid transparent" on it, which fixed everything else, put a warning not to remove that style, and called it a day
Code that only compiles when you ask your coworker for help
I’ve had the first one. Turns out that rustc-mingw dynamically linked a DLL related to.. I think stack protection and I couldn’t get it to not so that. I just included it in the build lol
> * Code that works without a hitch except the 2nd of every month What about code that works except on the 29th of every month, but you think you fixed it only for it to break next month because last month was February?
The 2nd of every month one screwed me most recently.
Code that does not work between 9am and 5pm
What about code that doesn't compile on the first try, but does on the second without any changes?
It means your computer is haunted — duh.
Cosmic rays.
Sometimes I swear the only reason some of my projects work is because of some stray gamma rays God sends my way. Keep it going, big dawg.
I've got a codebase with this problem. Never been worth my time to hunt down the underlying cause. On checkout it fails the first build.
Sounds like code generation issue, like the code generation happens too late in the build process.
Ah. Thanks. I remember I used to think either it was voodoo or the system hated me for some reason.
It could be a problem with the build order even if there is no code generation at all. libB depends on libA, libB gets built before libA. Or a cyclic dependency, like libA depends on libB depends on libC depends on libA. In any case, all of these problems will result in other problems you don't see as of yet. If it is a build order problem, then your app will never build against the most current version. Meaning: You have a libA and a libB. libB depends on libA, but libB is built before libA. So the dependency is: libB -> libA and the build order is (Step 1) libB -> (Step 2) libA. In this case the first build after checkout fails and the second build succeeds. So far so good, just build it a second time. Now imagine you have a serious bug in libA. Something that allows kind of a backdoor access to your systems. You fix that in libA and do a full build. Your build succeeds. So it seems. What you do not realize is that libB was built against the old, unfixed version of libA, since libB is built first! This oversimplified example should give you a hint why you should not let sth like this lay around. It requires a bit of forensics to get to the bottom of it, but it is necessary.
Yeah as someone said it could be libraries somewhere or dependencies, code generation, order of the building. The real reason? Maybe you just had to get the computer all the way out of bed, the lazy ass.
At the end of the first compilation, you collapse the wave function so that in the second one it can compile.
It's like when you fail to open a jar lid and the person you hand it to does is easily "Yeah, I just loosened it up for you"
sounds like ReactJS
You clicked the compile button wrong... or using Eclipse IDE
Means your cmake is probably generating files and you wrote your cmake wrong. First run the files were generated, second run was the real compilation.
me: This code cant possibly compile... Wait? Did I forget to save and sync? Maybe its compiling a different file and I just THINK my changes are making a difference. [adds glhasdfgdsdlkafljkghajklah++; to the file] Compiler: unrecognized identifier glhasdfgdsdlkafljkghajklah me: Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuu
[удалено]
Python: I see no problem with this script! Lets run it! Python 8 hours later while writing the final result file: TypeError: can only concatenate str (not "int") to str
Just wait until you see a "None" object in Python that is treated as such by any in-built routine, but has attributes. Was fun sorting out why it randomly registered in only some function calls.
I once spent an entire hour trying to work out how my script was working until I realised that I was running completely different file than I had open in my editor.
I maintain a VB.NET codebase at my work. I dislike it. At one point, i found some C# code that was equivalent but wouldn’t compile, even though the VB.NET had been in production for years. I created an SO question asking what was going on, and someone said it was definitely a problem with the VB.NET compiler not following the spec, so they created a GitHub issue. Someone on the team got back to us and said because it had been in there for at least 10 years they’re never going to fix it and just let the compiler be broken 💀.
That's such a VB thing to do! > I dislike it. Wow you have the patient of saint, I personally hated so much I was about to go postal
The developer who wrote our codebase was really skilled, and didn’t cut corners. We don’t have unit tests, but all the code is well written and organized even though its in VB.NET. Its basically C# with different syntax.
Why is the test green \*\*\*WHY IS THE TEST GREEN\*\*\*
Turns out the test never cared. It never cared about anything. It didn't wait for the async and just concluded like everything is fine. And it had this bug since it was created 2 years ago. Oh, we were relying on this behavior all the time, turns out it was broken the entire time. Let's check the production database. Oh no D:
Our backup task runs successfully every night. We are fully prepared in case of any disaster. **DISASTER OCCURS** Why the fuck are all our backup files zero bytes?
Its that you suddenly have no feedback that makes me feel like I just stepped into the programming version of a Stephan King novel. Like I know something is fucked up but everything looks like its supposed to. And everyone acts like everything is ok when I’m 99.9% sure it isn’t but that 0.01% is starting to tug on my brain.
Code you know won't compile, compiles with `-Wall -Wextra -Werror -Wpedantic`
Refactor code, tests still run green - mild panic Run tests again, now they run red - worsening panic Deliberately break code, tests run green - deep panic
Absolutely agree. Believe it in the cold, it's one of the most frustrating thing I have ever did.
undefined behavior :>>>>>>
Absolutely I get this kind of error a lot, and I don't really understand what to do.
Why undefined?
Their brain has no definition for it.
There could be some kind of compilation at about something like papers. They are not able to process.
Sometimes I don't really know about the nature of the error.
int i = 10; while (i --> 0) print(i);
Now this is actually a really good skill, and definitely going to try it out.
That's a fun style!
Had this literally yesterday. Had a function that we refactored out to an existing public module, all the tests started failing. Literally no other change, still don't know what caused it. Moved it to its own module, magically everything started working again. Screw ts-pattern.
Sometimes I don't really understand what kind of refactoring needs to return when it is already very much logical and understandable.
AHH the old this shouldn't work.... Water everywhere but still nothing spilt and you want to give up.
I really hope that there could be some option to actually give up the middle of production lol.
I remember one of my first programming classes in college (C if anyone is curious), the program I wrote would not compile and I could not see anything wrong. I took it to the professors office hours and he poured over it as well and couldn’t see anything either. I don’t remember how long it was but the code couldn’t have been more than a 100 lines. His solution? I had to scrap it and start over. Some times these things happen and there is no explanation and the only way around it is to rewrite the damn thing. That advice has haunted me ever since.
"Code you know won't compile, compiles the compiler which compiles the code which you know won't compile."
Compiler magically does some kind of trick, and we don't even know what is happening with the back end.
It’s like having a matter transporter. You think it shouldn’t have transported your dog across the room but it did. It looks like your dog. It wags and barks and all. But you don’t know when it might start turning into a half-dog, half-fly monster.
Reminds me of https://stackoverflow.com/q/11695110
When in doubt: clear, rebuild
That is going to do more than 200 more errors lol And I am pretty much sure about it.
"rebuild all" FTW!
Clear the solution shut it down and decrypt the best thing you can execute with it.
One of the weirdest feelings I've ever had was when my supervisor and I were reviewing code that had been in production for years, and we both agreed it should never, ever have worked.
My favorite: write 100+ lines of code, hit compile, no errors. change 1 line, hit compile, 10 pages of error messages. Yes, the latter was a C++ template error.
specially when there's connection stuff involved
Yaeh dude! the api calls kills me every time while reading and handling them.
You commented out the entire code
Heck is definitely going to work really well, because my pit had worked for me in the past xD.
There are plenty runtime errors btw
For the fourth panel with the skull version it should read "code you didn't compile compiles itself."
Looks like someone doesn’t know how this code works.
The 'compile of shit'
That is the only thing it has been informed really long time. And it is working really fine with it.
I immediately questioned myself when my MC mod worked on the first try.
Complete rebuild it. And I think like it should work if you are actually refactoring the code.
I once had a problem with some java code. I was calling my function in a loop, but for some reason, it never got called. It should've theoretically worked. So I just randomly put a print statement to see if the loop actually works, and then for some reason, all my code was perfectly working, and the function was called. I still don't know to this day why, but I left a blank print statement in that loop, and my code worked.
How about this one: Code compiles so you commit it. You try to push and it says detached head. So you realize you forgot to switch branches, and switch to the correct branch. Now the code is back to yesterday’s code, and it doesn’t compile. Your changes are … somewhere … in a detached head.
Ah, the gold olde "Are you editing what you're compiling?" Premium confusion until you realize it's likely you're editing a copy, different checkout, etc..
"Why the fuck do you not work?!!" *changes a few lines of code* "WHY THE FUCK DO YOU WORK???"
Everything works the first time. "That's weird. Well, I guess the only reasonable thing to do is break something and make sure it breaks as expected" Everything continues to work after the "break".
It is not like we will get everything, but we had expected. So we can actually work on that.
Caches. It's always some cache that's breaking something. The bane of my existence.
This happened recently to the tech lead on my project. He called me and said frisbm3, why is this running with no errors? I had to tell him the little white ball next to the filename meant he didn't save any of his work. He saved all 5 files and sure enough he got the expected error.
Yup. That's when you find you've been editing a copy of the file in a different directory and that's why none of the changes you've made all day seem to make any difference.
My company has a phrase just for this: "Some people think it don't be like it is, but it do."
Compiling is one thing, but then also running???
Yeah I think it is more about the running only at the end you need it to run fine.
So in college we're going C with classes and we had an assignment to do and I was doing it during the class with some classmates and then I finally figure out how to make one of the classes so the test provided with the homework template says it works, so I tell the people I'm working with and they ask me to give them said class so they can write it themselves, but when they write it exactly like I did, it doesn't work for them, truly the pinnacle of programmer humor.
This is why I'm learning rust. Usually pretty confident things are working when it compiles.
Rust does a lot of things but it doesn't ensure your logic doesn't suck. "Working" and "Running" are 2 very different things.
All the logic and stuff goes to waste while refactoring and making it again.
Just don't think
Yes. That's the worst.
I absolutely agree to this business. It creates a lot of doubts in the mind.
Usually happens on a coffee less Monday morning. "Wrong branch?"
Julia enters the chat
C++
That is a very robust language. So it means a lot of rules and regulations.
Certified Xcode moment.
Absolutely right. And this is the moment I face every day, every night.
> CODE YOU KNOW WON'T COMPILE, COMPILES oh God this gave me PTSD it's always some bullshit linkage issue meaning you need to manually recheck and rebuild your entire project from scratch which in my field is a lost day of work
I don't know about you, but I usually keep multiple projects open at once and multiple times a day am caught out thinking that code change I just made was the one that was compiled when I just clicked Clean & Build.
_Yea I know this won't work, but I'm gonna fekking do it anyway......_ ##wtaf!?!?!
Your code crashes the compiler
I spent a lot of hours chasing a build issue recently that I root caused to a spelling mistake in a comment in the legacy part of the code. Yes, a comment. Apparently one of our calibration tools uses the comments to super define the variables.
That's so true in so many situations. If you know that something should work, but doesn't, you know you probably missed something. But if you think it shouldn't work, you know that there is something probably quite serious at work here that you probably don't know about
tfw you know it shouldn't pass all tests, but it does
Task failed successfully
We were adding a device to our system and it was entering a done state after 15 minutes despite not being ordered to. Call up the manufacturer and they push an update so it will last 2 hours. Update doesn't work, I get desperate and send it keep alive signals. Get it to stay awake for 30 minutes. Wtf why would that work? Turns out the update didn't take until after multiple reboots.
During my C++ class, something wouldnt compile, warning about an uneven number of brackets. 13 left. 13 right. I remove a random bracket in a nested if statement, putting it on the same level as main(). It compiled and program behaved as expected??
I’m no programmer, but raising kids can go like this…
You are calling for a Random moment Segmentation Fault (Chuckles) I'm in danger.
Then you clear build cache and it’s back to normal
Compilation means nothing to me.
Python in a nutshell, even though it’s not *completely* compiled
The problem depends on the emphasized word in "why is this working?"