[PD] Very large patches unstable?

[Mathieu Bouchard]

On Thu, 3 Dec 2009, Matteo Sisti Sette wrote:

> It's not my case, no funny patching at all. I have now realised it 
> happens mostly when I save an abstraction which is used a few times (in 
> the order of 25, not thousands) in the main patch. I think it must be 
> some gem object because I think I did this thousands of times with PD 
> alone (though I try to avoid it if I can), and with no crashes.... 
> Obviously if I happen to find a 100% reproducible case I'll post it.

It doesn't need to be a 100% reproducible crash. If you run Pd in 
Valgrind and it finds "Invalid Write", that is most certainly a bug 
already, and it's possible that it triggers a Valgrind error 100% of the 
time on any machine, or that it triggers a crash 100% of the time on any 
machine, but that if you run it outside of Valgrind, it crashes only 
sometimes and only on some machines. That way, Valgrind is a great tool 
for finding bugs, especially elusive ones.

That said, there are some bugs that are more elusive than that, and for 
example, they may be completely invisible in Valgrind and crash 0% of the 
time in Valgrind, but crash some random % of the time outside of 
Valgrind...

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| Mathieu Bouchard, Montréal, Québec. téléphone: +1.514.383.3801