When I was in grad school and struggling with my Master’s thesis, I started a small side project in order to distract myself and work on something that felt more rewarding. This project was basically a clone of vim – a terminal-based text editor I called badavi. That was around seven years ago. I haven’t worked on it continuously since then, but I would occasionally go back and hack on it in short little bursts. In particular I’ve been doing this the last couple of months, and I thought it might be interesting to write about some of the things I’ve been up to.

For this post, we’ll look at some small performance fixes I made recently, guided by perf and flame graphs.

This is a quick post about a bug I ran into at work which turned out to be caused by passing a literal 0 instead of NULL to a function. Here’s a small program reproducing it:

The past few months at work I’ve been working with a large legacy codebase, mostly written in C. In order to debug problems as they come up, I wanted to use gdb – but it seemed like the program was only ever compiled with optimizations turned on (-O2), which can make using gdb a frustrating experience, as every interesting value you might want to examine has been optimized out.

After grappling with the build system to pass -O0 in all the right places (a surprisingly difficult task), I found that the program did not link with optimizations turned off. Once I got around that, I ran into a crash in some basic functionality, easily reproducible at -O0, but not -O2. This post contains two tiny contrived programs reproducing those issues.