[whizzter]

Large functions is a particular breeding ground.

Ages ago working on PS2 games one of our guys had a particularly huge "do-animations-and-interpolations-and-state-and-everything-for-the-hero-in-one-huge-switch" thingy (not uncommon to encounter in games) that crashed the GCC, the function was split up.

In the sequel I think a similar function grew enough that not only had they the function but also split in multiple files to avoid miscompiles.

Most recently I was generating an ORM binding(C#) from the database model of an ERP system, for mysterious reasons the C# runtime was crashing without stacktraces,etc (no debugger help). Having seen things like this before I realized that one of the auto-generated functions was huge so I split it up in multiple units and lo-and-behold it worked.

(Having written a tiny JVM once I also remembered that jump instructions are limited to 64kb, not 100% if the .NET runtime inherited that... once it worked I didn't put any effort into investigating the causes).

Most of the time though compiler bugs aren't the worst (unless they help cause confusion in already hard scenarios).