Software Folklore – A collection of weird bug stories

I've posted this story before, but it fits here rather nicely. I had a function that looked like this: void f() { bool flag = true; while (flag) { g(); } } This function would sometimes exit. But that's really all there was to the function. Somehow flag was becoming false, even though nothing ever wrote to it. So you might think about g() smashing the stack, when a variable is mysteriously changing, but you'd expect the return address to…

Long ago I worked on the firmware for a game controller. We started getting reports back of ghost inputs like stuck buttons and false presses after we sent some early hardware to media reviewers. Given the power of game media at the time, this was an immediate code red. We took shifts playtesting various video games for nearly a week straight just to try and replicate the issues. No luck, only the reviewers could manifest it. We were about to…