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Hash-Based Bisect Debugging in Compilers and Runtimes

Russ Cox · 18 Jul 2024 · research.swtch.com ↗

2 korrents from this piece

Russ Cox did not write this page.

Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

  1. Our reading

    Writing a technique down, however basic it seems, is the first step to making it usable by everyone.

    Their wordsBut writing a trick down is the first step to making sure everyone can do it: magic tricks can be basic but not obvious.

  2. Our reading

    Debugging by reasoning backward from a bad state is inherently harder than reasoning forward from a known decision point.

    Their wordsOne of the hardest things about debugging is running a program backward: there's a data structure with a bad value, or the control flow has zigged instead of zagged, and it's very difficult to understand how it could have gotten into that state.