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Unfathomable bugs #10: The Broken Windows Build

A Windows build crash was caused by a race condition where a dependent DLL's TLS callback ran before the main module's TLS was fully initialized, triggered by a specific CPU instruction (REP VMMCALL) in the DLL. The benign cycle on most systems became a timeout-based fork bomb on affected builds.

Background

- The "Broken Windows" theory of software engineering argues that small, visible problems (messy code, flaky tests) encourage larger decay; fixing them early prevents systemic rot. - This bug report describes a Windows build that fails in a way that seems inexplicable — a compiler or linker silently producing wrong output for no obvious reason, defying normal debugging. - The "Unfathomable bugs" series (algassert.com) documents real, maddening software defects that took extraordinary effort to diagnose; author Craig Gidney works on quantum computing (Quirk, Stim). - The post matters because it illustrates how brittle build systems can hide catastrophic bugs behind mundane symptoms, and why "just rebuild" is not always a safe fix.

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Unfathomable bugs #10: The Broken Windows Build

Background

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