Miscompilations (interpretations) are fairly common in my experience; just most of them don't drastically affect the final result. I used to have a methodical

Miscompilations (interpretations) are fairly common in my experience; just most of them don't drastically affect the final result. I used to have a methodical way of investigating most bugs: (1) here's what I know, (2) here's what I don't, (3) here's the thing I would like to know to most restrict the remaining search space. It was fine enough for awhile, but when you don't know things like "I wrote a 0 here, therefore a 0 exists here", or "my code explicitly uses aligned 32-bit reads, so I issued an aligned 32-bit read here", the errors in your assumptions quickly get amplified into nonsense. Nowadays I explicitly includle miscompilation (interpretation), bit-flips, and other such garbage as I write down what I do or don't know about the system, and I throw in ballpark probabilities to figure out where to look next. Most debugging isn't noticably slower that way, but the hairy problems are easily 10x easier when you haven't conditioned yourself to ignore the real solution.