Comment by flysand7

100%, debugging is an absolute joy, especially with niche systems-level kinda of bugs that simply can not be debugged with simple printf's.

I had a friend once asking me to help debug a weird issue over discord. We went through some obvious things like are there any other threads running or is there something obviously wrong with the code. We didn't find anything so we went on to the best part -- trying to figure out the root cause from the panic. Checked the pointer values, wrote them down, checked where the TLS is, wrote that down to. At that point I forgot how Windows had TLS arranged, so I pulled up some docs, while the other guy fiddled around with the debugger. I found the TLS layout, and the debugger we used didn't have any kind of TLS debugging enabled, so we had to pull up PE spec to do some calculations on where the addresses could end up and sure enough the answer came -- we had a TLS corruption. Turns out he used a C bindings library that had a typo that overwrote the TLS and was messing with his variables.

Debugging is such a joy when it feels like Sherlock Holmes movies.

(*) For anyone who thinks might be misreading this, TLS means thread-local storage, not transport layer security. I'm sure I've had my share of wrong search results because of this too.