@gabrielesvelto

And since we’re at it let’s shame Google for putting 20 thousand variables in a single function. Bad Google, no cookie.

I once worked on a game engine that used ODE as its physics layer. At the core of ODE collision detection and handling was a function that built a Jacobian matrix on the stack (using alloca) to compute the forces to apply to objects colliding to separate them. We crashed on touching the stack redzone in Windows when our engine ran as a plugin in Internet Explorer—not something we could fix easily on our end, since the size of a thread redzone is decided at compile time by the application configs (which, again, application is Internet Explorer).

Filed a ticket against ODE maintainers and their response was basically “We don’t consider that application domain to be a meaningful one to fix bugs in.” So we fixed it on our end by #define-ing alloca away to a heap allocation in a tiny buffer.

Point of this story is: no shame on Google. Google doesn’t consider the Firefox browser on old Linux configurations a meaningful application domain to fix bugs in. And if you can’t point to where in the JavaScript language spec it says 20,000 variables is disallowed… Shame on Mozilla for having a noncompliant JS implementation. ;)

At least it was easy to fix.

It is interesting though that we find ourselves working around a bug we did not introduce triggered by code we do not control.

Oh yeah… That’s the nature of Internet software. It is interesting every time. :) I’ve had to get up from the keyboard and take a walk twice in my career, and the first time was when I realized if I’m going to be writing web software, that’s going to be, like, my whole career: stuff breaking because someone changed something somewhere that I was relying on for their own reasons. Internet software is like 1/3 technology and 2/3 social network effects.