Translation

Unfathomable bugs #10: The Broken Windows Build

A Windows-only build failure was traced to a Unicode no-break space (U+00A0) accidentally inserted into a source file, which looked identical to a regular space but caused parser errors.

Background

- "algassert.com" is Craig Gidney's blog — he's a Google Quantum AI engineer who writes the "Unfathomable bugs" series about bizarre, hard-to-reproduce software defects. - A "Broken Windows Build" is a build that fails only because the build machine's cache is stale or corrupted, not because the code is wrong. The name borrows from the "broken windows" theory of urban decay. - Most large projects use incremental builds (Make, Bazel) to avoid recompiling everything. These cache intermediate outputs. If a cache entry goes bad without triggering a rebuild, the build breaks in a way that cannot be reproduced on a clean machine — making it seem "unfathomable." - Gidney's example: a third-party build script changed a timestamp file in a way that confused the cache, causing failures that only appeared on certain developers' machines months later. Fix: clean rebuild or correct the timestamp logic.

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Unfathomable bugs #10: The Broken Windows Build

Background

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