Segfault when calling show on an Integer of a certain size
You're not going to believe this.
$ ghc -e 'let k = show (10^184000) in k == k'
True
$ ghc -e 'let k = show (10^187000) in k == k'
True
$ ghc -e 'let k = show (10^186000) in k == k'
Bus error
That's right: there is a problem which affects Integer values which are 186000 digits long, but which does not affect values which are 187000 digits long.
So 10^184000
works fine, 10^187000
works fine, but 10^186000
doesn't. What about 10^185000
? Well, it depends on your version of GHC. And on chance. GHC 7.10.0.20150123 is always happy with 10^185000
, but GHC 7.8.3 crashes about two-thirds of the time:
$ ghc -e 'let k = show (10^185000) in k == k'
True
Segmentation fault
And it's a different kind of crash, too! A segmentation fault instead of a "bus error".
I have tried all the lengths in [1000,2000,..,100000]
, and some lengths are fine, some lengths have a bus error, and some lengths segfault. The most helpful lengths I've encountered give an error message about malloc:
$ ghc -e 'let k = show (10^264000) in k == k'
True
ghc(72417,0x107081000) malloc: *** error for object 0x107300000: pointer being freed was not allocated
*** set a breakpoint in malloc_error_break to debug
Abort trap
Sometimes it gives a slightly different error message:
$ ghc -e 'let k = show (10^264000) in k == k'
ghc(72453,0x107381000) malloc: *** error for object 0x107200128: incorrect checksum for freed object - object was probably modified after being freed.
*** set a breakpoint in malloc_error_break to debug
Abort trap
Anyway, a lot more people posted their results in the following reddit thread, without realizing that the problem had to do with the length: http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/31yajd/can_you_explain_this/
So far, only folks on OS X have managed to reproduce the problem. The problem occurs with ghci
, runhaskell
and ghc -e
, but not with compiled binaries.
Trac metadata
Trac field | Value |
---|---|
Version | 7.10.1 |
Type | Bug |
TypeOfFailure | OtherFailure |
Priority | normal |
Resolution | Unresolved |
Component | GHCi |
Test case | |
Differential revisions | |
BlockedBy | |
Related | |
Blocking | |
CC | hvr |
Operating system | |
Architecture |