3 ms·
It wasn't proprietary software, but I used to work with a sustaining engineer who ran Firefox in a gdb session. He was a "tab hoarder" and this was before the d
by ericbarrett 5y ago
It wasn't proprietary software, but I used to work with a sustaining engineer who ran Firefox in a gdb session. He was a "tab hoarder" and this was before the days it would save your session; when it reset he complained that he'd lose days of context. I watched him hand-repair a SIGSEGV from a null pointer dereference. As he was doing so he explained he'd reported this particular bug a few weeks ago but "Mozilla's triage was taking a while." A few keystrokes later he'd backed up a couple of frames, set a condition variable to avoid the bad code, and continued the process without interruption. Hugely impressive.
- e3bc54b2 5y agoImpressive indeed, but what is a sustaining engineer?
- ericbarrett 5y agoAn engineer dedicated to bugfixes and crash investigations, rather than feature development. Not a common title anymore, but you'll still find them attached to products that use their own kernel, like switches and network storage.
- MontyCarloHall 5y agoI’m surprised the performance overhead of running a whole web browser inside a debugger was remotely tolerable for daily use. Wouldn’t it have been easier (and way more performant) to just whip up a quick extension that dumps the list of open tabs to disk every time a tab is opened/closed? I recall session savers being some of the very first extensions available for Firefox.
- alerighi 5y agoIf you don't set breakpoints, it's not slower than running the software normally.