Client crashing bugs

[LilBudyWizer]

My client is crashing periodically and I suspect it's addons causing it. Since you can't save anything through a crash it's rather hard to say for certain. An addon should never be able to crash the client. And in a perfect would I assume no quests would be broken either. While testing an addon I crashed the client so found it's certainly possible. So I thought a thread of things developers have encountered that will crash the client might be a good idea.

My mistake was infinite recursion. It's a rather hard one to slip through since it locks up the client as well. While tracking it down I most often had to kill the client since it locked up, but, occasionally, the client crashed first. The source of my recursion was accidently using an API function name for a function that actually called that API function.

It certainly highlighted an error in my coding style that allowed that to happen. I should have stuck all the local functions in a local global. It would certainly make it clearer in the code whether I'm calling a function my addon versus the API. It would let me share those functions between files as well call forward on local functions. With 2K lines it's a bit late for this addon.

[katkat42]

I've mostly managed to freeze the client, not crash it outright, and that was by calling functions from the vanilla API that were never meant to be called like I was doing.

(I also managed to run the UI out of memory once, but I can't remember now how I did it. I think it involved infinite recursion.)

[pjt15253]

I can consistently hard-crash the client with string.find("", "[aàáâäAÀÁÂÄ][aàáâäAÀÁÂÄ][aàáâäAÀÁÂÄ][aàáâäAÀÁÂÄ]"). Same with string.match, string.gmatch, and string.gsub. Generally if you stay away from non-ascii characters you're ok - but there's definitely a bug in the Lua pattern matching functions.

[sirinsidiator]

I recently fixed a crash in AwesomeGuildStore. Because of that I tried to run every method in the global object with several different "invalid" arguments today and had quite a number of crashes.
I have not tried any methods in tables or userdata yet, but will probably do someday.

• FormatAchievementLinkTimestamp crashes when called with a negative number
• GetTradingHouseSearchResultItemInfo, GetTradingHouseSearchResultItemLink and SelectTitle crash when called with an invalid index
• ZO_DeepTableCopy turns into an infinite loop when passed a table that contains a reference to itself
• Many functions that expect a control element crash when they get empty/invalid userdata instead.