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Reminds me of this: https://xkcd.com/1172/

I made updates to some of my code security reasons that ended up speeding things up a little bit (smaller binary to load + less reliance on permanent storage). This caused other developer's code to crash because he inadvertently needed my code to run slow under certain conditions (it wasn't obvious that the issue was a speed thing).

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How do issues like this happen? I'm fairly new to software development and I haven't really seen issues like this, and I'm having trouble thinking of what types of code would cause it.

I'm assuming it's usually related to things using multiple threads or at the boundaries of different programs communicating?

Yes of course. It's concurrency related. You write a program that starts something, does some work, then tries to access the something expecting that it's already started. On your computer, the "does some work" stage happens to take long enough that the thing has indeed already started. On some other machine, it doesn't and you get a crash or hang.

It happens quite often when developing concurrent software.

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