more crashes with Rev 3.5 and above?

[Phil Davis]

Hi folks,

I'm trying to understand the experience one client is having. We moved 
his Mac-only standalone app from the 3.0 engine to 3.5, then a couple of 
weeks later to 4.0. Since moving beyond 3.0, his customers seem to be 
experiencing a lot more "app unexpectedly quit" crashes. Is it just my 
perception, or is that your experience too?

If you have the same increase in crashes, have you found any particular 
commands or command sequences that either increase or decrease the crash 
frequency? Or has your crash rate remained unchanged since 3.0?

When the problem happens, it's normally during a file read. Like this:

-------- from crash log ----------
Exception Type:  EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGBUS)
Exception Codes: KERN_PROTECTION_FAILURE at 0x0000000000000000
Crashed Thread:  0  Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread

Thread 0 Crashed:  Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread
0   libSystem.B.dylib             0xffff0916 __memcpy + 374
1   libSystem.B.dylib             0x9848de4f fread + 132
2   ...ss.app.rev 0x001405df MCS_read(void*, unsigned int, unsigned 
int&, IO_header*) + 111
3   ...ss.app.rev 0x001bab88 MCVariableArray::loadkeys(IO_header*, bool) 
+ 744
4   ...ss.app.rev 0x00112eb8 MCObject::load(IO_header*, char const*) + 1880
5   ...ss.app.rev 0x001a15e0 MCStack::load(IO_header*, char const*, 
unsigned char) + 64
6   ...ss.app.rev 0x00072a0c MCDispatch::readfile(char const*, char 
const*, IO_header*&, MCStack*&, bool) + 1260
7   ...ss.app.rev 0x00072ed9 MCDispatch::loadfile(char const*, 
MCStack*&) + 585
8   ...ss.app.rev 0x00073247 MCDispatch::findstackname(MCString const&) 
+ 343
9   ...ss.app.rev 0x00029677 MCChunk::getobj(MCExecPoint&, MCObject*&, 
unsigned int&, unsigned char) + 2103
-------- end of crash log ----------

But the same files are most often read without a problem. This makes me 
think there's something environmental going on, but that's a guess.

Thanks for any responses.
-- 
Phil Davis

PDS Labs
Professional Software Development
http://pdslabs.net