Subtle Corruption and the Debugger [Snippet]

We had a bug. If a certain method was called, we would do something very bad. Here is the fix for this issue:

Basically, we assumed that the passed pointer is a char pointer and not a UTF8 byte pointer. That led to horrible mess down the line, including the fact that the length passed to the constructor is twice the size of the actual allocated memory.

In rare cases, that would be enough to push us to the next page of memory. If that page of memory wasn’t mapped, we would die with an access violation.

There is just one problem with this scenario. We never called this method in our codebase. This method was implicitly called by the debugger to show nice strings. Which meant that during debugging, sometimes, we would corrupt our own state and end up killing ourselves. For fun, this is the kind of error that literally cannot be debugged.