War story: the hardest bug I ever debugged

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462 points jakevoytko | 2 comments | 24 Mar 25 14:37 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source

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aetimmes ◴[27 Mar 25 14:24 UTC] No.43493994[source]▶

(disclaimer: I know OP IRL.)

I'm seeing a lot of comments saying "only 2 days? must not have been that bad of a bug". Some thoughts here:

At my current day job, our postmortem template asks "Where did we get lucky?" In this instance, the author definitely got lucky that they were working at Google where 1) there were enough users to generate this Heisenbug consistently and 2) that they had direct access to Chrome devs.

Additionally - the author (and his team) triaged, root caused and remediated a JS compiler bug in 2 days. The sheer amount of complexity involved in trying to narrow down where in the browser code this could all be going wrong is staggering. Consider that the reason it took him "only" two days is because he is very, _very_ good at what he does.

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1. ivraatiems ◴[27 Mar 25 15:52 UTC] No.43494924[source]▶

>>43493994 #

Imagine if you weren't working at Google and were trying to convince the Chromium team you found a bug in V8. That'd probably be nigh-impossible.

One thing I notice is that Google has no way whatsoever to actually just ask users "hey, are you having problems?", a definite downside of their approach to software development where there is absolutely no communication between users and developers.