My reading is that this is entirely Go’s fault. In Go, there was a union of two different types without metadata to distinguish the two. The disambiguation was done by looking to see if the data looked like a certain pointer.
I think the reason it is a problem only in 32 bit systems is that the assignment setting the lower half of the data is a 32 bit op, which can overflow the 16 bits used, but won’t affect the other half of a 64 bit value. (Corrections welcome.)
If it's a system I want to understand more deeply and I have the time, I try to force myself to do it by hand. If not, the agent does it.
The trap is that it's easy to convince myself that I never have the time.
The way I got good at finding the hard ones was finding hard ones. Without that practice, I would be helpless.
I think the reason it is a problem only in 32 bit systems is that the assignment setting the lower half of the data is a 32 bit op, which can overflow the 16 bits used, but won’t affect the other half of a 64 bit value. (Corrections welcome.)
What really sky-rocketed my debugging skills in embedded devices was learning to utilize the Python plugin interface of 'gdb'.