CODEWITHSUNDEEP
vb6
user884248
user884248

Reputation: 2244

VB6 creates corrupt compiles...?

I have known for a while that VB6 is trouble, but what can I do - I have a legacy system to maintain and it still being developed here and there.

And I had the weirdest thing ever happen to me with VB6 just now.

Compiled a new version of our application. Tested it - it worked.

Deployed to a client production site. Application keeps crashing! When? When the user clicks anywhere inside a DHTMLEdit control that we have in a specific window. Or sometimes even on the window that contains it.

Now, I've had this before and the solution was always very cryptic. So I tried the following: incremented the project's revision number by 1, recompiled, and guess what?

Works perfectly.

I cannot show code because we are talking about 50,000 lines of code here, and there is no specific code called when clicking the DHTMLEdit control, the form, whatever.

I'm just wondering if anyone else had encountered this oddity.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 137

Answers (1)

jmoreno
jmoreno

Reputation: 13561

The VB6 compiler is not a deterministic compiler and does not produce anything near consistent output. IOW, while fixing your bug is not by design, the fact that it can produce such behavior is.

But even in deterministic compilers, making a small change can sometimes "fix" (aka hide) bugs that are triggered by memory alignments, or variable initialition

Upvotes: 2

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