<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><br class=""><div><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class="">On Sep 14, 2016, at 7:50 AM, Patrice Kouame via swift-users <<a href="mailto:swift-users@swift.org" class="">swift-users@swift.org</a>> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><div class=""><div class="" style="font-family: Alegreya-Regular; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;">1. File those bugs and issues in radar, but lower your expectations a bit. That’s how I usually vent my frustrations. Just imagine the thousands they have to sift through...</div><div class="" style="font-family: Alegreya-Regular; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;">2. Be constructive: if possible provide some workarounds, even sloppy ones - don’t be shy and engage discussion</div><div class="" style="font-family: Alegreya-Regular; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;">3. Have a thick skin: welcome some constructive criticism</div></div></blockquote></div><br class=""><div class="">I can also add: <i class="">challenge yourself to diagnose the problem</i>. Even if you don’t know the innards of the compiler or runtime. I’m a technology owner and help support developers using it, and I find that many times people report bugs or ask for help without having done all they could to analyze the problem. Sometimes this is a dead end, but often you can uncover more information that can greatly help the engineers fix the bug, and sometimes you can find workarounds that get you unblocked.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Some advice based on stuff I see in my project’s forums:</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">— Read error messages carefully. Sometimes people report that “it won’t compile” or “it crashed” and append a dump of the log, without noticing that the log includes a message that pretty clearly identifies what they did wrong.</div><div class="">— Look for clues in crash logs / backtraces. Even if you don’t know how the software is implemented or have the source code, just looking at the function names in a backtrace or crash can give you clues about what it’s doing, which might help you find workarounds.</div><div class="">— Try to boil a problem down to a simpler case. Ideally something you can do in a playground.</div><div class="">— Learn common crash/error patterns. I can’t think of any Swift-specific ones at the moment, but a super common Objective-C one is the crash in `objc_msgsend`, which an experienced developer knows the program must have messaged either a deallocated object, or a bogus object reference.</div><div class="">— Treat debugging as a science. Act like a scientist. Examine the evidence, form hypotheses, invent experiments to test the hypotheses. “If this variable is being clobbered, maybe it’s because this method is called re-entrantly? I can add a flag to it to test for a re-entrant call…”</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">—Jens</div></body></html>