Check Your Code First before Looking to Blame Others

Developers — all of us! — often have trouble believing our own code is broken. It is just so improbable that, for once, it must be the compiler that’s broken.

Yet in truth it is very (very) unusual that code is broken by a bug in the compiler, interpreter, OS, app server, database, memory manager, or any other piece of system software. Yes, these bugs exist, but they are far less common than we might like to believe.

I once had a genuine problem with a compiler bug optimizing away a loop variable, but I have imagined my compiler or OS had a bug many more times. I have wasted a lot of my time, support time, and management time in the process only to feel a little foolish each time it turned out to be my mistake after all.

Assuming the tools are widely used, mature, and employed in various technology stacks, there is little reason to doubt the quality. Of course, if the tool is an early release, or used by only a few people worldwide, or a piece of seldom downloaded, version 0.1, Open Source Software, there may be good reason to suspect the software. (Equally, an alpha version of commercial software might be suspect.)

Given how rare compiler bugs are, you are far better putting your time and energy into finding the error in your code than proving the compiler is wrong. All the usual debugging advice applies, so isolate the problem, stub out calls, surround it with tests; check calling conventions, shared libraries, and version numbers; explain it to someone else; look out for stack corruption and variable type mismatches; try the code on different machines and different build configurations, such as debug and release.

Question your own assumptions and the assumptions of others. Tools from different vendors might have different assumptions built into them — so too might different tools from the same vendor.
When someone else is reporting a problem you cannot duplicate, go and see what they are doing. They maybe doing something you never thought of or are doing something in a different order.

As a personal rule if I have a bug I can’t pin down, and I’m starting to think it’s the compiler, then it’s time to look for stack corruption. This is especially true if adding trace code makes the problem move around.

Multi-threaded problems are another source of bugs to turn hair gray and induce screaming at the machine. All the recommendations to favor simple code are multiplied when a system is multi-threaded. Debugging and unit tests cannot be relied on to find such bugs with any consistency, so simplicity of design is paramount.

So before you rush to blame the compiler, remember Sherlock Holmes’ advice, “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth,” and prefer it to Dirk Gently’s, “Once you eliminate the improbable, whatever remains, no matter how impossible, must be the truth.”

By Allan Kelly