I just tried 4.03.0 (no flambda), recompiling all, and the problem still occurs. (And thanks to opam and a fast compiler, this process was quick and easy!)

Jesper, those numbers coming through in that problem do look similar. Anyone know what they are? They strike me as familiar, but I can't place it: looks like escaped octal triplets, with occasional letter and terminated by some low-valued marker (\1,\2) -- and it's a proper string, not like random memory.

Gabriel, I am perfectly happy with getting bitten by "clever code", due to a smarter compiler -- well, provided there's a way to express what's wanted. :)

Jeremy, I will try to reduce this to a simpler case with just tgls/opengl, and see if I can trap the flawed cases, or make it easily reproducible. Right now I have to head out to work though.

Thanks for the input, guys!


On Sun, May 8, 2016 at 10:52 PM, Jeremy Yallop <yallop@gmail.com> wrote:
On 8 May 2016 at 18:08, Anthony Tavener <anthony.tavener@gmail.com> wrote:
> TL;DR: Constant string like "fontColor" can (rarely) come out like
> "\220\552\663\1" after foreign call to OpenGL.
>
> I was seeing glitches in render output, and have tracked it down to "uniform
> variable names" which are given as constant strings, but on OpenGL side they
> can appear malformed.
>
> OCaml call:
>
>     let color = Gl.get_uniform_location sp "fontColor" in
>
> In a trace of the OpenGL calls from the running program the result is
> usually like this:
>
>     glGetUniformLocation(program = 3, name = "fontColor") = 3
>
> But on occasion (once in several hundred calls) has garbage:
>
>     glGetUniformLocation(program = 3, name = "\220\552\663\1") = -1
>
> The really odd thing to me is the structure of these strings (some more, not
> all from "fontColor"):
>     "\220    \774\1"
>     "\220\332\663\1"
>     "\440\\\665\1"
>     "\220\552\663\1"
>     "\220J\663\1"
>     "\660\117\553\2"
>     "\440\220w\2"
>
> For reference, Gl.get_uniform_location is implemented thusly (in tgls):
>
>   let get_uniform_location =
>     foreign ~stub "glGetUniformLocation"
>       (int_as_uint @-> string @-> returning int)
>
>
> I am using OCaml 4.03+flambda. The problem occurs with -O3 or no
> optimizations. The problem might have happened with prior versions (I
> haven't been able to work with OCaml much in the past year), and my own code
> is of course suspect. :)
>
> I'm posting in case this rings a bell for someone, that they might know
> what's going on. I'm continuing to debug.

If you have a reproducible test-case I'd be interested to take a look at this.