People sometimes say “it’s never a compiler error”. They don’t mean it literally — what they mean is that it’s very tempting to blame the compiler or interpreter for a bug that is actually in our own code. But sometimes, when the stars align, there it is. The mythical interpreter bug.

I’m going to show you how I narrowed down from “the website is crashing on my computer” to a real, live bug in the Ruby interpreter. We’ll look at how we can use techniques we already know, like unit testing and git, in the unfamiliar context of Ruby’s C internals. And, when we’ve finally figured out what’s causing our bug, we’ll go through the bug reporting process and learn how to share our findings and help make Ruby better for everyone.

Friday, 5th July 2019