Sometimes, the old ways are the best
serpentine.com
serpentine.com
But when I saw how quickly he fixed the problem, I reconsidered. As wrong as low-level tweaking in a high-level language feels, if it's still less work to optimize than in C or Java, that's a win, right?
The more abstract code is great when it works well, and when it falters I can easily drop down to something more concrete, or even to C, and still have most of my code benefit from that higher level of thinking.
It sounds like you might be trying to be snarky, as if someone is trying to sweep details under the rug, but just as "the file had its first bit flipped" is more descriptive than "the file is corrupt" but the latter is still a correct description, "unevaluated thunks" is merely a more precise categorization of "space leak", which is itself a subset of "resource leaks", after all.
I thought readers here might find that information useful, given that someone might describe a problem similar to the OP's by using the term "space leak".
My guess is that there was a feedback loop somewhere, with the JSON output of a process being fed into the same process as input, adding extra backslashes each time the data went through the loop.
Sounds a little like doubly-encoded JSON. Not that I would know about or have ever been responsible for something like that.
JSON strings containing zillions of backslashes. (I have no idea why.
I've seen source code where someone was fond of using forward and backslashes in comments as a banner. Perhaps that might be related.
Of course, it sounds like if it hit the pathological edge case in that setup, it would be in just of bad a position.