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How a 20 year old bug in GTA San Andreas surfaced in Windows 11 24H2

(cookieplmonster.github.io)
1371 points yett | 2 comments | 23 Apr 25 14:00 UTC | HN request time: 0.425s | source
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db48x ◴[23 Apr 25 14:32 UTC] No.43772686[source]▶
[flagged]
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mschuster91 ◴[23 Apr 25 14:43 UTC] No.43772801[source]▶
To u/db48x whose post got flagged and doesn't reappear despite me vouching for it as I think they have a point (at least for modern games): GTA San Andreas was released in 2004. Back then, YAML was in its infancy (2001) and JSON was only standardized informally in 2006, and XML wasn't something widely used outside of the Java world.

On top of that, the hardware requirements (256MB of system RAM, and the PlayStation 2 only had 32MB) made it enough of a challenge to get the game running at all. Throwing in a heavyweight parsing library for either of these three languages was out of the question.

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Magma7404 ◴[23 Apr 25 14:52 UTC] No.43772895[source]▶
The comment reappeared, and while you're right about using proper libraries to handle data, it doesn't excuse the "undefined behavior (uninitialized local variables)" that I still see all the time despite all the warning and error flags that can be fed to the compiler.

Most of the time, the programmers who do this do not follow the simple rule that Stroustrup said which is to define or initialize a variable where you declare it (i.e. declare it before using it), and which would solve a lot of bugs in C++.

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Yeask ◴[23 Apr 25 15:16 UTC] No.43773146[source]▶
And it did not matter at all. The game shipped and was a success.
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1. usefulcat ◴[23 Apr 25 17:45 UTC] No.43774700[source]▶
Let's be clear that it was a success very much in spite of UB, not because of it. And there was still a cost--likely at least hundreds of person-hours spent fixing other similar bugs due to UB (if not more).

I worked in gamedev around the time this game was made and this would have been very much an ordinary, everyday kind of bug. The only really exceptional thing about it is that it was discovered after such a long time.

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2. ◴[23 Apr 25 20:19 UTC] No.43776234[source]▶