So I fixed a really annoying bug in my video player program where it sometimes just hung waiting on network input.
I thought it was going to be a really hairy multi-threaded concurrency issue, as I was building a blocking i/o interface on top of a non-blocking URL-fetching layer in order to reuse existing libraries.
I scoured my code looking for incorrect ordering, bad locking, or a problem with my semaphores…. Bit by bit the code was instrumented, logged, inspected, cleared, cleaned, and set back in place better than it was before. But the bug remained, untamed — nay untouched — by my onslaught.
At last I found the part of the code the bug was hiding: if the input buffer ran dry and the last network fetch had already completed, the i/o thread would die and the blocking request would time out.
But why was it broken? Because… um… I forgot to call the function that sends a follow-up request for more data.
headdesk