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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 | 1 comments | 23 Apr 25 14:00 UTC | HN request time: 3.256s | 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. db48x ◴[24 Apr 25 04:42 UTC] No.43779309[source]▶
It was available and widely celebrated, but there was no guarantee that these Windows and console developers had heard of it yet or that they could have used it if they had.