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Author Topic: More iOS Shortcuts bugs - final garbage code  (Read 3303 times)

Weaver

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More iOS Shortcuts bugs - final garbage code
« on: May 22, 2021, 07:23:59 AM »

In iOS Shortcuts, sometimes after you have saved a program and then you run it or look at it later, you discover a certain amount of garbage code at the end as if appended. My best guess is that it sometimes saved an entire block, packet, or alloc cell and gets the length wrong, always overestimating it. The idea is that block or alloc cell’s total length is used rather than the length of the valid data in it, and I’m thinking that it saves uninitialised garbage bytes which are interpreted as Shortcuts opcodes. Why it happens only sometimes is a total mystery though. It could be when it syncs programs in the iCloud, but I’m not at all sure. Or maybe it’s the editor getting the length wrong on a save.

Deleting the garbage off the end is an effective workaround. When you run a duff program affected in this way, it really does perform bizarre actions according to the garbage opcodes seen in the editor later, so it’s very serious. Valid code is never lost, so the length seems never to be too short. That is surprising, and very fortunate.

It is amazing that the developers have never seen this, because it isn’t extremely rare.
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burakkucat

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Re: More iOS Shortcuts bugs - final garbage code
« Reply #1 on: May 22, 2021, 05:21:52 PM »

Have you submitted a report about the problem to the relevant entity? (Whoever that may be.)  :-\
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Weaver

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Re: More iOS Shortcuts bugs - final garbage code
« Reply #2 on: May 22, 2021, 06:51:26 PM »

Ashamed to say ‘no’. I have submitted reports to Apple before, but can’t remember for the life of me now how to do it if you are not an official dev kit user. Also I don’t know how to reproduce it, so not very helpful to the dev team.

Apple bought up he company that invented the Workflow app, took on their staff I believe and then renamed the app to Shortcuts, with added close integration with voice control. Also improved the syntax hugely with a much more compact display of opcodes and their parameters. Now code looks much more readable.
« Last Edit: May 22, 2021, 06:59:29 PM by Weaver »
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