my only compiler bug was a doozy: pre-egcs gcc, on a strange MIPS chipset running an odd mix of at&t and bsd. the machine had been retired, and was being used

my only compiler bug was a doozy: pre-egcs gcc, on a strange MIPS chipset running an odd mix of at&t and bsd. the machine had been retired, and was being used (with blessing) as a host for a MUD. it turns out that gcc was compiling with an opcode that was invalid on this particular architecture, causing the application to crash in weird ways. being pre-egcs, it was easy to track down and fix by changing the opcode to two instructions instead, fixing the problem. it was then I understood why this very cool (to me) machine with a fast multi-cpu and high memory had been retired: it's hard to reliably run binaries that you compile that crash randomly, and I seemed to have been the only one to take the time to figure out why.