Where to look for Segmentation fault? - c++

Question

My program only sometimes gets a Segmentation fault: 11 and I can't figure it out for the life of me. I don't know a whole lot in the realm of C++ and pointers, so what kinds of things should I be looking for?
I know it might have to do with some function pointers I'm using.
My question is what kinds of things produce Segmentation faults? I'm desperately lost on this and I have looked through all the code I thought could cause this.
The debugger I'm using is lldb and it shows the error being in this code segment:
void Player::update() {
// if there is a smooth animation waiting, do this one
if (queue_animation != NULL) {
// once current animation is done,
// switch it with the queue animation and make the queue NULL again
if (current_animation->Finished()) {
current_animation = queue_animation;
queue_animation = NULL;
}
}
current_animation->update(); // <-- debug says program halts on this line
game_object::update();
}
current_animation and queue_animation are both pointers of class Animation.
Also to note, within Animation::update() is a function pointer that gets passed to Animation in the constructor.
If you need to see all of the code, it's over here.
EDIT:
I changed the code to use a bool:
void Player::update() {
// if there is a smooth animation waiting, do this one
if (is_queue_animation) {
// once current animation is done,
// switch it with the queue animation and make the queue NULL again
if (current_animation->Finished()) {
current_animation = queue_animation;
is_queue_animation = false;
}
}
current_animation->update();
game_object::update();
}
It didn't help anything because I still sometimes get a Segmentation fault.
EDIT 2:
Modified code to this:
void Player::update() {
// if there is a smooth animation waiting, do this one
if (is_queue_animation) {
std::cout << "queue" << std::endl;
// once current animation is done,
// switch it with the queue animation and make the queue NULL again
if (current_animation->Finished()) {
if (queue_animation != NULL) // make sure this is never NULL
current_animation = queue_animation;
is_queue_animation = false;
}
}
current_animation->update();
game_object::update();
}
Just to see when this function would output without any user input. Every time I got a Segmentation fault this would output twice right before the fault. This is my debug output:
* thread #1: tid = 0x1421bd4, 0x0000000000000000, queue = 'com.apple.main-thread, stop reason = EXC_BAD_ACCESS (code=1, address=0x0)
frame #0: 0x0000000000000000
error: memory read failed for 0x0

Answer 1

Some causes of segmentation fault:
You dereference a pointer that is uninitialized or that points to NULL
You dereference a deleted pointer
You write outside the bounds of the scope of allocated memory (e.g. after the last element of an array)

Answer 2

Run valgrind with your software (warning, it really slows things down). Its likely that memory has been overwritten in some way. Valgrind (and other tools) can help track down some of these kinds of issues, but not everything.
If its a large program, this could get very difficult as everything is suspect since anything can corrupt anything in memory. You might try to minimize the code paths run by limiting the program in some way and see if you can make the problem happen. This can help reduce the amount of suspect code.
If you have a previous version of the code that didn't have the problem, see if you can revert back to that and then look to see what changed. If you are using git, it has a way to bisect search into the revision where a failure first occurred.
Warning, this kind of thing is the bane of C/C++ developers, which is one of the reason that languages such as Java are "safer".
You might just start looking through the code and see if you can find things that look suspicious, including possible race conditions. Hopefully this won't take to much time. I don't want to freak you out, but these kinds of bugs can be some of the most difficult to track down.