[racket-dev] Win64 crashes (was: Pre-Release Checklist for v5.3.4)

From: Matthew Flatt (mflatt at cs.utah.edu)
Date: Fri Apr 19 12:20:23 EDT 2013

At Thu, 18 Apr 2013 22:23:37 -0600, Doug Williams wrote:
> I did have DrRacket crash twice on startup. I'm running the 64-bit version
> under Windows 8 64-bit.

The stars have aligned this morning!

We've had reports of crashes specific to 64-bit Windows, but I had not
been able to replicate the crash. This morning, it turns out that I'm
able to provoke a crash easily and consistently (by trying the same
things that I've always been trying).

That crash that I see in the stack-unwinding code for generating JIT
stack traces, which is Win64-specific and added September 2012 (after
v5.3, before v5.3.1). That functionality is particularly likely to be
triggered when you Run or Check Syntax a program. The bugs could easily
manifest as either an immediate crash or a freeze. And the bugs could
easily have no effect, depending on Racket thread scheduling and the
layout of the stack. So, I think this bug is consistent with all of the
reports.

Even better, it turns out that I spent much of yesterday staring at the
stack-unwinding code (for ARM), so the details were all paged in.

I've pushed a repair, and I'll ping you when a build is ready to try out.


Posted on the dev mailing list.