Raymond Chen

Raymond Chen pulled the 100 most recent crash dumps for one third-party program into a pivot table. They looked like four separate bugs: 11 stack overflows in shell32, 23 access violations in an unknown component, more overflows in ctxapclient64. One cause produced all of them.

An engineer who reproduces Windows bugs under virtualization had a sharper question than the diagnosis: what support tier do you need before the legendary Chen ever looks at your coredumps?

Microsoft's Raymond Chen wrote a belated obituary for Tony Krueger, who made spell-check run quietly in the background and drew the red squiggle that flags a typo as you type, with green later added for grammar.

A reader spotted the catch: Chen cites Wikipedia as proof of who did the work, and Wikipedia's current source for that claim is a link straight back to Chen's article.

Each write-byte instruction was 4 bytes. 65,536 of them meant 256 kilobytes of machine code to initialize 64 kilobytes of stack: a 4:1 code-to-data ratio.

Rather than run the bloat as written, the binary translator recognized the monstrous function and substituted the compact loop the compiler should have emitted.

The asterisk from the thread: maybe it wasn't a bug at all, and the fully unrolled version was actually faster on the real hardware.