How a 20 year old bug in GTA San Andreas surfaced in Windows 11 24H2

Post by nayuki » Wed, Apr 23, 2025, 7:40 PM UTC

ormax3 wrote: post #134

amenghra wrote: post #98

IMHO, if something isn’t part of the contract, it should be randomized. Eg if iteration order of maps isn’t guaranteed in your language, then your language should go out of its way to randomize it. Otherwise, you end up with brittle code: code that works fine until it doesn’t.

one might argue that one of the advantages of languages like C is that you only pay for the features you choose to use, no unnecessary overhead like initializing unused variables

Post by MrRadar » Wed, Apr 23, 2025, 7:42 PM UTC

mrighele wrote: post #121

trinix912 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While it doesn't excuse the bad habits, we do have to keep in mind C++98 (or whatever more ancient was used back then) didn't have the simple initializers we now take for granted. You couldn't just do 'Type myStruct = {};' to null-initialize it, you had to manually NULL all nested fields. God forbid you change the order of the variables in the struct if you're nesting them and forget to update it everywhere. It was j…

I haven't been using C++ for a number of years but I think you could set the default values of fields even back then. Something like struct test { int my_int = 0; int* my_ptr = std::nullptr; }; Or is this something more recent ? You cannot initialize them with a different value unless you also write a constructor, but it not the issue here (since you are supposed to read them from the file system)

    struct test {
        int my_int;
        int *my_ptr;
        
        test() : my_int(0), my_ptr(NULL) {}
    };

Post by isatty » Wed, Apr 23, 2025, 7:45 PM UTC

pmarreck wrote: post #87

My takeaway, speaking as someone who leans towards functional programming and immutability, is "this is yet another example of a mutability problem that could never happen in a functional context" (so, for example, this bug would have never been created by Rust unless it was deeply misused)

Post by Juana32 » Wed, Apr 23, 2025, 7:51 PM UTC

fragmede wrote: post #97

danbolt wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ll be the first to defend the greybeards I’ve befriended and learned from in AAA, but having seen codebases of that age and earlier, the “meta” around game development was different back then. I think the internet really changed things for the better. Your average hire for the time might have been self-taught with the occasional C89 tutorial book and two years of Digipen. Today’s graduates going into games have fal…

Otoh, the Internet has meant that nothing is ever finished, there's always an update to download.

Post by ajross » Wed, Apr 23, 2025, 7:55 PM UTC

Thaxll wrote: post #138

ajross wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As if tools in early 2000's were any good...