C compiler bugs that make you go hmmm…

There is a PIC compiler from CCS that I use at work. Every now and then we run across a bug (most of which get quickly fixed by CCS). The latest is a rather bizarre issue where strings are getting mixed up.

Attempting to do something like this:

printf("Value %d", value);

…created output like:

XXXXXX42

…because somewhere else in the code was this:

printf("XXXXXXXXXXXXX");

The compiler was using the correct format string (to know where to put the %d variable on output) but was displaying the string from a different bit of code.

And that other bit of code was unused (not being called at all).

This may be a compiler optimizer bug, but I found it amusing. I haven’t seen a mixed up printf() issue before.

Until next time…

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