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Comment by hart_russell | Hacker News Reader

A company like Apple should have complex enough tools to perfectly capture system state at the time of the bug so that they can reproduce it

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I don't work at Apple, so I can't comment on that. But that doesn't always help. There's been plenty of times where I have a full HAR file from the user and I can clearly see that something went wrong, but that doesn't always mean I can reproduce the issue. (I recognize a HAR file doesn't represent the complete state of the world, but it's often one of the best things a backend developer can get)

Reminds me of this Raymond Chen Microsoft blog post:

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20241108-00/?p=11...

It always helps. Even if you can't determine the root cause you can at least add an extra assertion check or logging statement at that point so that next time the bug gets triggered you'll at least get more useful diagnostic data and can get a step close. Iterate until you find the root cause.

That’s easy enough. The hard part is doing so without capturing a bunch of email, messages, and other private data that happens to be in memory at the time.

Ignorant question, if privacy didn’t matter and they had an atomically identical machine, would there still be plenty of edge cases where it was the printer or the Wi-Fi causing the issue?

In any case I would have said it sounds difficult on every front

I should be more precise. Capturing the system state isn’t too hard. Turning that into a reproducer may be quite hard, because of things like you say. There are certainly a lot of bugs that such a capture would make easier to figure out, but it wouldn’t be a panacea.

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