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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: 0.402s | source
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gigatexal ◴[23 Apr 25 19:17 UTC] No.43775701[source]▶
Use a debugger folks. A 10x dev cited this story to me about the ills of not using one.
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ajross ◴[23 Apr 25 19:26 UTC] No.43775777[source]▶
Tools like valgrind/asan/msan would have flagged this instantly too. Just a unit test of that vehicle loader would have seen it.

Really this is more a story about poor development practice than it is an interesting bug.

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Thaxll ◴[23 Apr 25 19:35 UTC] No.43775857[source]▶
As if tools in early 2000's were any good...
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ajross ◴[23 Apr 25 19:55 UTC] No.43776033[source]▶
Valgrind was released in 2002 to immediate celebration. It was available and surely known to the team. All they needed to do was write a unit test that loaded and instantiated those vehicle files and run it with "valgrind" in front of the command line.
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1. gmueckl ◴[23 Apr 25 20:37 UTC] No.43776382[source]▶
I don't know whether Valgrind ever gained support for any of the GTA target platforms. It wasn't available on Windows for a very, very long time.
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2. zerd ◴[24 Apr 25 16:29 UTC] No.43784623[source]▶
Still isn't available for windows from what I gather.