Comment by LegionMammal978

From GP:

> (with checks for things like this enabled)

You can (and could) easily compile an optimized build with debug symbols to track down sources of issues, but catching a bug like this would likely take a dynamic checker like Valgrind or MSan, which do not allow for any optimizations if you want to avoid false negatives, and add even more overhead on top of that. (Valgrind with its full processor-level virtualization, and MSan with its shadow state on every access. But MSan didn't exist at the time, and Valgrind barely existed.)

At minimum, fine-grained stack randomization might have exposed the issue, but only if it happened to be spotted in playtests on the debug build.