Ok, so your nice Nim program crashes under various hard-to-reproduce conditions. What can you do about that? Test with different GCs ======================= * ``--gc:boehm`` * ``--gc:refc`` * ``--gc:markAndSweep`` Note that if your program does not crash with a different GC, it doesn't imply you found a GC bug! It's just a weak indicator. Test under different OSes ========================= * Linux * MacOS X * Windows Test under different CPUs ========================= * i386 (32bit) * amd64 (64bit) * arm Test different compiler options =============================== ``-d:release`` vs debug mode is the obvious choice, but the Nim GC, allocator and standard library have many more checks you can should enable: | -d:useSysAssert enables assertions in the system.nim, especially in Nim's allocator. | -d:useGcAssert enables assertions in Nim's GC. | -d:nimBurnFree overwrite deallocated memory with 0xff bytes so that "access after free" triggers a segfault. Edit lib/system/mmdisp.nim and gc.nim ===================================== Even more debugging options can be enabled by editing ``lib/system/mmdisp.nim``. Most of these have no ``--define`` equivalent, unfortunately. One problem with corruptions is their non-deterministic nature, in particular heap and stack addresses change from run to run. Define ``-d:corruption`` to enable "cell IDs", so that every "cell" (that is every ``ref``/``string``/``seq``) gets a unique ID. It's often interesting to see if the corrupted cell has the same ID from run to run or if it differs. If it differs the bug is non-deterministic. Within the GC ``writeCell`` can be used to output offending cells.