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- Hacker News
- I wonder what other 32 bit bugs are waiting to be discovered.
- Isn't this something that software developers do everyday?by budman1
- The way I look at these types of difficult debugging problems has completely changed.
If it's a system I want to understand more deeply and I have the time, I try to force myself to do it by hand. If not, the agent does it.
The trap is that it's easy to convince myself that I never have the time.
by apitman - Not directly related to your embedded Go bug, but maybe helpful:
What really sky-rocketed my debugging skills in embedded devices was learning to utilize the Python plugin interface of 'gdb'.
by BlackRabbit1 - Go was born into 64-bit era, I remember seeing many more bugs that only occur on 32-bit systems. I'm pretty certain the observation in the article is correct that no one at Google tests Go on anything apart from 64-bit ARM/x86 Linuxby nasretdinov
- FWIW, every commit for the Go project is tested on multiple 32-bit architectures, including pre-commit tests and post-commit tests.
You can see a list here:
(That particular build dashboard just shows post-commit tests. '386' there is 32-bit x86, 'arm' is 32-bit ARM.)
I can't speak to what Google runs in production or what Google tests internally, but the Google-run CI for the Go project definitely does test 32-bit, and those tests essentially match the tests run against 64-bit.
by typical182 - So a stronger type system in the boundary between Go and Linux would have caught this?
- My reading is that this is entirely Go’s fault. In Go, there was a union of two different types without metadata to distinguish the two. The disambiguation was done by looking to see if the data looked like a certain pointer.
I think the reason it is a problem only in 32 bit systems is that the assignment setting the lower half of the data is a 32 bit op, which can overflow the 16 bits used, but won’t affect the other half of a 64 bit value. (Corrections welcome.)
by fn-mote - Very interesting read, these bugs that only happen after a lot of time in production are the worse to troubleshootby dlopes7