Category Archives: Bugs

Reflections on My Tech Career – Part 2

Posted on November 10, 2025 by brucedawson

This is second and final part of the story of how my career as a software developer unfolded (part 1 is here). In this half I work at four different companies in the Seattle area, make my mark, and then … Continue reading →

Posted in Bugs, Chromium, Floating Point, Investigative Reporting, Linux, Performance, Programming, Quadratic, Symbols, uiforetw, Unicycling, Xbox 360, xperf | Tagged , , , , , | 20 Comments

Finding a VS Code Memory Leak

Posted on October 9, 2025 by brucedawson

In 2021 I found a huge memory leak in VS code, totalling around 64 GB when I first saw it, but with no actual limit on how high it could go. I found this leak despite two obstacles that should … Continue reading →

Posted in Bugs, Code Reliability, Debugging, Investigative Reporting, memory, Programming, Rants | Tagged , , , , | 17 Comments

Google Maps Doesn’t Know How Street Addresses Work

Posted on April 24, 2025 by brucedawson

(or actually they do, but they don’t use this knowledge effectively) Update, April 26, 2025: the address fix for W 6th Ave is live, mostly. Going forward I wish that Google Maps would make it harder to get bad data … Continue reading →

Posted in Bugs, Rants | Tagged , , , | 14 Comments

Determinism Bugs, Part Two, Kernel32.dll

Posted on January 6, 2022 by brucedawson

It was literally the day after I cracked the __FILE__ determinism bug that I hit a completely different build determinism issue. I was asked to investigate why the Chrome build number reported for Chrome crashes on Windows 11 was lagging … Continue reading →

Posted in Bugs, Chromium, Computers and Internet, Investigative Reporting, Programming, Symbols | Tagged , , | 19 Comments

Two Deterministic Build Bugs

Posted on January 4, 2022 by brucedawson

‘Twas the week before Christmas and I ran across a deterministic-build bug. And then another one. One was in Chromium, and the other was in Microsoft Windows. It seemed like a weird coincidence so I thought I’d write about both … Continue reading →

Posted in Bugs, Chromium, Computers and Internet, Debugging, Programming | Tagged , , | 14 Comments

Finding Windows HANDLE leaks, in Chromium and others

Posted on July 25, 2021 by brucedawson

Three years ago I found a 32 GB memory leak caused by CcmExec.exe failing to close process handles. That bug is fixed, but ever since then I have had the handles column in  Windows Task Manager enabled, just in case … Continue reading →

Posted in Bugs, Code Reliability, Investigative Reporting, uiforetw, xperf | Tagged , | 20 Comments

The Easy Ones – Three Bugs Hiding in the Open

Posted on August 30, 2020 by brucedawson

I write a lot about investigations into tricky bugs – CPU defects, kernel bugs, transient 4-GB memory allocations – but most bugs are not that esoteric. Sometimes tracking down a bug is as simple as paying attention to server dashboards, … Continue reading →

Posted in Bugs, Code analysis, Code Reliability, Debugging, Floating Point, Linux, Performance | Tagged | 17 Comments

GDI leaks and the importance of luck

Posted on May 10, 2020 by brucedawson

In May 2019 I was asked to look at a potentially serious Chrome bug. I initially misdiagnosed it as unimportant, thus wasting two valuable weeks, and when I rejoined the investigation it was the number one browser-process crash in Chrome’s … Continue reading →

Posted in Bugs, Chromium, Debugging, Programming | Tagged | 25 Comments

Bugs I Got Other Companies to Fix in 2013

Posted on December 31, 2013 by brucedawson

Over the course of a year I fix a lot of bugs – that’s part of my job. But I’m not going to write about that. Instead I want to write about bugs that I found in other companies’ code, … Continue reading →

Posted in Bugs, Programming | Tagged , | 12 Comments

How to Report a VC++ Code-Gen Bug

Posted on October 14, 2013 by brucedawson

My coworkers recently found a bug in the x64 code generated by Visual C++. This bug exists in VC++ 2010 to VC++ 2013 RC. We put in a workaround (the traditional one of disabling optimizations for the afflicted function) and … Continue reading →

Posted in Bugs, Investigative Reporting, Programming, Visual Studio | Tagged , , | 10 Comments