sigh, another “impossible” bug

Since yesterday I’ve been fighting a mystery bug, one of those “should never happen” bugs that happen in unsafe languages like C++. Under some narrow set of circumstances, fetching the top item from the production queue fails with symptoms which indicate that the queue is both empty (so you can’t get the top item) and not empty (so that you try to). In other words, something stepped on the data structure and broke it. I haven’t touched the queue lately, so it might be anything.

Luckily it’s reproducible, at least usually, so I can narrow it down step by step. It’s not due to the new ops boss, it’s not due to changes in the combat commander, etc. The narrowing down process eats time as if time were the world’s most luscious burrito. I’ve now determined that it has something to do with the hydralisk den in the queue, so I may be getting close.

See bizarre bug for my May experience in being called stupid by the language. Coding in a safe language is 10 times nicer. :-/

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Joseph S Huang on Monday, August 6. 2018:

It probably has to do with the q reordering.

Jay Scott on Thursday, August 9. 2018:

There were 2 bugs, a newly-added trigger bug that set the conditions by incorrectly deleting a hydralisk den, and an older underlying bug that reacted by breaking the queue. They both have to do with zerg emergency reactions. And they are both fixed.

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