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Very specific and annoying situation here:

- Working on a machine learning project with other people
- I'm on Linux, they use Windows
- We code in python
- We generally use vscode for development, and its python extension

I implement some basic neural networks with tensorflow, and add a bunch of logging for it. I test it on my machine and it works fine.
But, my group mates report that "after a few seconds the entire client hangs".
Apparently it only happens on Windows?
We start debugging the hell out of the code I implemented, added 20 log messages and sat there for a solid hour.

Until I make one very odd realization: the issue doesn't happen when I run the script in my terminal, instead of vscode with the debugger. So I try different debug settings, using an external terminal instead of vscode's built in debug console seems to fix it too.
And I make another observation: In the debug console, some messages don't seem to appear at all, while the external terminal shows them just fine.

So, turns out, that printing an epsilon character: “ε” (U+03B5), causes the entire thing to hang up.

It's the year 2020 and somehow we still can't do unicode.
I'm so done, what on earth.

Comments
  • 3
    @Demolishun I guess I was lucky.

    The script would just hang after 2 seconds without any error message, if I didn't notice these things by pure coincidence, this could have cost us days...
  • 2
    There's quite a lot of things that don't support wide characters. UTF-8 is a multi-byte-encoding hack to the solution.

    It will be many years before wide characters are the norm and not the exception
  • 8
    Reminds me of a comment on a post talking about Javascript being used in the SpaceX Dragon2's onboard flight interface.

    "The fact that they successfully sent astronauts to space with a system using a language that equates 10 + "5" as 105 and 10 - "5" as 5 is a demonstration that even the zenith of human technological marvel is still held together with duct tape."
  • 2
    @alcatraz627 that sounds terrible oh my god
  • 0
    This. Thread.
  • 0
    @Demolishun exactly. That gut feeling comes from experience. It’s not really coincidence, it’s experience.
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