[MapServer-dev] Schrödinger's bug

[Even Rouault]

Seth,

Several things:

- there used to be a time where you couldn't safely mix code built with 
different versions of Visual Studio, but this was relaxed since VS 2015 
(https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/porting/binary-compat-2015-2017?view=msvc-170), 
and anyway apparently this isn't the case here, given release-190-x64 is 
built with VS2022. The only thing however is that your Python binary is 
likely not built with VS2022. But thinking of GDAL, we have the same 
situation and a Windows CI setup with VS2022, and things work well.

- you could potentially try https://github.com/dynamorio/drmemory which 
is an equivalent of Valgrind, that runs on Windows.

- It is strange that you get different behaviour with Release vs 
RelWithDebInfo. Perhaps RelWithDebInfo generates a binary with slightly 
lower optimization level. This is the case with gcc where RelWithDebInfo 
is -O2 whereas Release is -O3. I couldn't quickly find info on that for 
MSVC, but might be something to investigate

- all the fuzzing fixes are about error code paths, not regular code 
triggered by a nominal sane mapfile.

- we can never exclude compiler bugs, and that's quite a headache to 
spot them and reduce to a simpler reproducer. But it could also be that 
VS2022 optimizes something more greedily on a part of the code that may 
rely on some undefined behavior. C/C++ has many undefined behaviours, 
and compilers may decide to do different things, and sometimes crazy 
things, on code with such undefined behaviour. it could also be a memory 
corruption whose effects manifest themselves later in weird ways.

- it could indeed be interesting to check if you can reproduce the issue 
outside of a python context, for example with 
https://github.com/rouault/mapserver/commit/9d64dc65461c4df30da0f9170de4300331a6d173 
("tostring" branch of https://github.com/rouault/mapserver/)

Even

Le 16/10/2022 à 11:07, Seth G a écrit :
> Hi all,
>
> I've been trying to get MapScript for Python working for MapServer 8.0 using Visual Studio 2022 and the release-1930-x64 SDK from GISInternals- see issue https://github.com/MapServer/MapServer/issues/6628
>
> In summary, whenever you try and save a Mapfile to a file in Python (all versions from 2.7 to 3.10 are affected) there is a "Windows fatal exception: access violation".
>
> Note, everything builds fine when using Visual Studio 2019 (and the release-1928-x64 SDK) with the same MapServer code.
>
> The worst thing is that when running a DEBUG version of the code - everything works fine. The exception only works in RELEASE version, which means my "debugging" involves modifying code, recompiling and rerunning.
>
> The fact it doesn't work in RELEASE version strongly implies that VS2022 is doing some optimization which causes the issue. I'm not sure how best to progress this, and hoping someone on the list may have some ideas.
>
> - With each of the fuzzing fixes, I've been hoping the issue will be resolved. Could it be the case that memory is getting corrupted and causing the issue?
> - Is it likely the cause is a bug in the MapServer code which causes something to be optimized away that shouldn't be?
> - Is there any chance there is a bug in VS2022 itself rather than anything in MapServer?
> - Commenting out various parts of `writeWeb, and `writeFeature` get things working again, but there seems to be no logic to this - e.g. commenting out half of the `writeLayer` means it works again (with no changes to `writeWeb`), but commenting out a single line in `writeWeb` also gets it working, removing parts of `writeFeature` also works, a Mapfile with one LAYER works one with 2 LAYERS doesn't..
> - the `writeMapToString` [1] is only called using MapScript. Would it be worth adding an option to map2img to dump out an input Mapfile to test this without any MapScript?
>
> Thanks for any input!
>
> Seth
>
>
> [1] https://github.com/MapServer/MapServer/blob/e5a53178b056f0da83ec8e5a2e0412a50d0ca3a6/mapfile.c#L5904
>
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