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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

Tools like valgrind/asan/msan would have flagged this instantly too. Just a unit test of that vehicle loader would have seen it.

Really this is more a story about poor development practice than it is an interesting bug.

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Problem with valgrind/asan/msan is that you have to start using these tools early in the development process. It can't be a "checklist" item before launch, or you'll have an insurmountable number of bugs, often with them baked in such that fixing the bug causes additional changes that introduce unrelated bugs.

As if tools in early 2000's were any good...

Valgrind was released in 2002 to immediate celebration. It was available and surely known to the team. All they needed to do was write a unit test that loaded and instantiated those vehicle files and run it with "valgrind" in front of the command line.

I don't know whether Valgrind ever gained support for any of the GTA target platforms. It wasn't available on Windows for a very, very long time.

Still isn't available for windows from what I gather.

It was available and widely celebrated, but there was no guarantee that these Windows and console developers had heard of it yet or that they could have used it if they had.

I tried to use Valgrind to catch pretty much this exact bug 20 years ago, and it was nigh impossible. If you call any 3rd party code it'll have flag tens of thousands of false positives that you have to sift through. And that was on a small game engine, I can't imagine running it on millions of lines of code.

Again, you don't valgrind a whole game. You valgrind your unit tests. Even in 2004 when this game was released, and even in the game industry, unit testing was a routine thing. And this particular bug was in code very amenable to lightweight unit testing.

That would be assuming they knew there was a bug in that particular part of the code, which they probably didn't, until Windows 11 24H2. And unfortunately Valgrind doesn't work on windows.

Valgrind does not run on Windows.

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