Bug Glossary

Browse 10 bug terms defined in plain English, from the cultural dictionary of computing.

10 Bug Terms

Connection Leak
A bug where database connections are opened but never returned to the connection pool, eventually exhausting all available connections. The database equivalent...
Deadlock
A state where two or more processes are each waiting for the other to release a resource, so none of them can proceed. The computational equivalent of two...
Floating Point
A representation of real numbers using a mantissa and exponent (like scientific notation), defined by IEEE 754. Provides wide range but limited precision --...
Heisenbug
A bug that disappears or changes behavior when you try to observe or debug it — named after Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. Common causes: race conditions...
Heisenfeature
A bug that the product manager insists is actually a feature. Cousin of the heisenbug. 'That's not a bug, it's a heisenfeature.'
Memory Leak
A bug where a program allocates memory but never releases it, causing memory usage to grow continuously until the process crashes or the OOM killer intervenes....
Race Condition
A bug that occurs when the behavior of a system depends on the sequence or timing of uncontrollable events — when two operations 'race' and the outcome depends...
Retain Cycle
A memory leak pattern in reference-counted systems where two or more objects hold strong references to each other, preventing the runtime from ever...
Segfault
Segfault, short for segmentation fault, is a runtime error that occurs when a program attempts to access memory that it is not allowed to, such as reading from...
Time Zone Handling
One of the hardest problems in programming. Rules: store all timestamps in UTC, convert to local time only for display. Use IANA timezone names...

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