i've seen a few one off hardware fails from presumably external factors like neutrons slamming into things... i've found a small handful of compiler bugs, altho

i've seen a few one off hardware fails from presumably external factors like neutrons slamming into things... i've found a small handful of compiler bugs, although nowadays this is considerably rarer than it used to be (i haven't seen one in about two years and the last one was in a proprietary 'obviously not quite finished' compiler), and from working with rendering and OpenGL a bewildering number of driver bugs - some deeply embarassing like using GL_CW to signify counter-clockwise vertex winding. these cases aren't really leaky abstractions though - just bugs and i don't need to know the details to find them. this is just buggy abstraction imo. however, i do agree with your point about performance being a common leak - the most recent MS STL is an interesting example. its performance is quite horrific in some circumstances due to some very sledgehammer thread-safety approaches which are not necessary but protect bad programmers from themselves (a recurring theme in many such libraries) - in this case the abstraction is leaky in that I discover implementation details by profiling things that wouldn't normally be expected to be a performance problem... just like you say.