Questions tagged [debugging]
Debugging is the process of examining the state of a program - generally with a debugging tool - while it is running and attempting to find bugs that cause it to behave abnormally.
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Is there a name for the hierarchy of "trustworthiness" many engineers use while debugging?
I'm looking for a name or attempts to document a particular thought patten used by most experienced engineers when they debug.
Most experienced engineers develop a sense of hierarchy for what is ...
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How to manage working directory in interactive development environments like Jupyter Notebook?
I'm having trouble with managing the working directory in Jupyter Notebook. For example, I have a .py script that requires me to change the working directory to its directory to run it properly. I've ...
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How do AI developers for LLM fix bugs when the LLM misbehaves, given that they cannot control what the LLM learns from the data?
The traditional non AI software with if-then-else and loop statements can be fully controlled. In contrast, machine learning software behaviour is unpredictable since the developer cannot control what ...
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Should a bug fixer know the overall structure what the program does?
I heard that if you maintain a program, you have to study what the code does. Another engineer said it is not necessary. Just use test cases to find out the function that does not work well, modify ...
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Code platform only accepts manual copy-pasting. How to debug the code locally effeciently?
I'm writing a script for a webapp, which I can only copy my code manually to its platform and not push it from my machine. In the code there are parts that use its API and parts that don't. I cannot ...
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Code readability and debugging
Sometimes, I have a hard time deciding between two good code traits: debuggability and readability. The snippets below are an oversimplification, but they illustrate my pain.
Example 1:
if(...
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Debugging miscompile [closed]
Recently I encountered an issue at work where a unit test written in C++ would crash only when being compiled with MSVC 2017 (MSVC 2019 and up are fine). I tried to debug this issue and it seems like ...
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What are some considerations when deciding to fix a bug, or rewrite the code in question?
At some organizations I'm seeing a trend where if a bug is reported, engineers will directly rewrite the offending code without knowing the root cause. In general this will fix the bug, but in my ...
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TL suggests that testing, refactor, and tool usage could avoid the need for verbose logging
Additional Context
I make infrastructure for automated device testing. Debugging can be very time consuming because the devices have many states and are constantly being updated with new builds which ...
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is it bad practise to go back to your last backup when you encounter an unneccessary bug? [closed]
I find when I am programming and I fix a bug in one area of the codebase, sometimes something slightly related or maybe unrelated breaks, and as a result I usually copy and paste the fix to a ...
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Debugging to track attribute change
I have a very large C++ application running on a *nix environment, which is occasionally setting a particular date attribute on a structure, way off what it should be. I know which structure and which ...
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How far can one debug a low-level API in closed-source environments?
Assume a low-level API is provided without source code (e.g. DirectX).
The API provides a virtualization of hardware resources (GPU, CPU, audio card, etc.), which enables the user to call hardware-...
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A bug was found in my code. Should I migrate the application as planned, or focus on patching the bug?
While testing my iOS application against the latest version, I've discovered a bug. For the purpose of this question, I am omitting the details of the bug.
I was planning to migrate the application to ...
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In debugging, how to set breakpoints in expressions?
In (the most widely used) programming languages there is a distinction between "statements" (function or loops bodies, assignments... basically "the stuff that ends with a ';'") ...
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Debug statements in production quality code?
Would anyone here recommend using debug statements such as the following in production quality code?
I think these are personally one of the easiest to include or exclude, but they make the code hard ...
