Get the latest tech news
Hash-based bisect debugging in compilers and runtimes
Posted on Thursday, July 18, 2024. PDF Setting the Stage Does this sound familar? You make a change to a library to optimize its performance or clean up technical debt or fix a bug, only to get a bug report: some very large, incomprehensibly opaque test is now failing.
Brian Ness and Viet Ngo published “ Regression containment through source change isolation ” at COMPSAC ’97 (August 1997) describing a system built at Cray Research that they used to deliver much more frequent non-regressing compiler releases. One 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. For Go 1.23, we rewrote the time.Timer implementation and changed its semantics slightly, to remove some races in existing APIs and also enable earlier garbage collection in some common cases.
Or read this on Hacker News
