Diagnosing a Vim Crash

[A. S. Budden]

Dear all,

I use gvim 7.4 on Windows 7. I have quite a lot of plugins installed.
I have recently (in the last few months) been experiencing reasonably
frequent crashes while browsing code. The crashes are unpredictable
(sometimes I'm not even touching the keyboard or mouse when they
happen; sometimes gvim isn't even the active window - e.g. I'm
browsing the web at the time). However, the unpredictability is making
it very difficult for me to diagnose what is causing the issue -
sometimes I can use gvim for several hours without any problems; other
times it will crash within a few minutes.

The message I get when it crashes is:

Vi Improved - A Text Editor has stopped working
A problem caused the program to stop working correctly. Windows will
close the program and notify you if a solution is available.

The first thing I tried when I started having this problem was to go
back to an earlier revision of my vimfiles folder (I keep it under
Mercurial version control) from before it started crashing. This made
no difference. I also tried going through the most recent 10 or so
plugins that I'd installed and turning them off one by one and using
vim for a while - in all cases I eventually managed to make it crash.
I've tried gvim -u NONE -U NONE and didn't experience a crash, but
given that the crashes are so inconsistent in their timing, I cannot
be absolutely sure in my assumption that the crash is due to a plugin.

I was using a self-compiled version of gvim, but have since tried a
newly compiled version from a more recent revision and also a stock
version downloaded from vim.org - all show the same problem. In
desperation, I compiled a debug build so that I could try to see what
was happening at the point of failure, but I haven't managed to make
that version crash yet...

I realise I'm not giving much in the way of useful information here,
but I was hoping someone might be able to suggest an approach that
might help me narrow down what is causing the issue.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

Al

Current version information (although as I said I've changed versions
a lot of times):

VIM - Vi IMproved 7.4 (2013 Aug 10, compiled Sep 5 2015 11:14:55)
MS-Windows 32-bit GUI version
Included patches: 1-827
Compiled by digit...@SPAMdancingpaper.com:http://SteveHallArchitecture.com
Big version with GUI. Features included (+) or not (-):
+acl +cindent +conceal +digraphs
+extra_search +gettext/dyn +libcall
+mksession +netbeans_intg -profile
+scrollbind +syntax +textobjects
+visualextra -xfontset
+arabic +clientserver +cryptv -directx
+farsi -hangul_input +linebreak
+modify_fname -ole +python/dyn +signs
+tag_binary +title +viminfo
-xim
+autocmd +clipboard +cscope -dnd
+file_in_path +iconv/dyn +lispindent
+mouse +path_extra +python3/dyn
+smartindent +tag_old_static +toolbar +vreplace
-xterm_save
+balloon_eval +cmdline_compl +cursorbind -ebcdic
+find_in_path +insert_expand +listcmds
+mouseshape +perl/dyn +quickfix -sniff
-tag_any_white +user_commands +wildignore
-xpm_w32
+browse +cmdline_hist +cursorshape
+emacs_tags +float +jumplist +localmap
+multi_byte_ime/dyn +persistent_undo +reltime
+startuptime -tcl +vertsplit +wildmenu
++builtin_terms +cmdline_info +dialog_con_gui +eval
+folding +keymap +lua/dyn
+multi_lang -postscript +rightleft
+statusline -tgetent +virtualedit +windows
+byte_offset +comments +diff +ex_extra
-footer +langmap +menu
-mzscheme +printer +ruby/dyn
-sun_workshop -termresponse +visual
+writebackup
system vimrc file: "$VIM\vimrc"
user vimrc file: "$HOME\_vimrc"
2nd user vimrc file: "$HOME\vimfiles\vimrc"
3rd user vimrc file: "$VIM\_vimrc"
user exrc file: "$HOME\_exrc"
2nd user exrc file: "$VIM\_exrc"
system gvimrc file: "$VIM\gvimrc"
user gvimrc file: "$HOME\_gvimrc"
2nd user gvimrc file: "$HOME\vimfiles\gvimrc"
3rd user gvimrc file: "$VIM\_gvimrc"
system menu file: "$VIMRUNTIME\menu.vim"
Compilation: i686-pc-mingw32-gcc -Iproto -DWIN32 -DWINVER=0x0500
-D_WIN32_WINNT=0x0500 -DHAVE_PATHDEF -DFEAT_BIG -DHAVE_GETTEXT
-DHAVE_LOCALE_H -DDYNAMIC_GETTEXT -DFEAT_CSCOPE -DFEAT_NETBEANS_INTG
-DFEAT_GUI_W32 -DFEAT_CLIPBOARD -DFEAT_MBYTE -DFEAT_MBYTE_IME
-DDYNAMIC_IME -DDYNAMIC_ICONV -pipe -w -march=i386 -Wall
-I/cygdrive/c/strawberry/perl/lib/Core -DFEAT_PERL
-DPERL_IMPLICIT_CONTEXT -DPERL_IMPLICIT_SYS -DDYNAMIC_PERL
-DDYNAMIC_PERL_DLL="perl518.dll"
-I/cygdrive/c/PROGRA~2/Lua/5.1/include -I/cygdrive/c/PROGRA~2/Lua/5.1
-DFEAT_LUA -DDYNAMIC_LUA -DDYNAMIC_LUA_DLL="lua51.dll" -DFEAT_RUBY -I
/cygdrive/c/Ruby193/lib/ruby/1.9.1/i386-mingw32 -I
/cygdrive/c/Ruby193/include/ruby-1.9.1 -I
/cygdrive/c/Ruby193/include/ruby-1.9.1/i386-mingw32 -DDYNAMIC_RUBY
-DDYNAMIC_RUBY_DLL="msvcrt-ruby191.dll" -DDYNAMIC_RUBY_VER=191
-DFEAT_PYTHON -DDYNAMIC_PYTHON -DFEAT_PYTHON3 -DDYNAMIC_PYTHON3 -O3
-fomit-frame-pointer -freg-struct-return -s
Linking: i686-pc-mingw32-gcc -Iproto -DWIN32 -DWINVER=0x0500
-D_WIN32_WINNT=0x0500 -DHAVE_PATHDEF -DFEAT_BIG -DHAVE_GETTEXT
-DHAVE_LOCALE_H -DDYNAMIC_GETTEXT -DFEAT_CSCOPE -DFEAT_NETBEANS_INTG
-DFEAT_GUI_W32 -DFEAT_CLIPBOARD -DFEAT_MBYTE -DFEAT_MBYTE_IME
-DDYNAMIC_IME -DDYNAMIC_ICONV -pipe -w -march=i386 -Wall
-I/cygdrive/c/strawberry/perl/lib/Core -DFEAT_PERL
-DPERL_IMPLICIT_CONTEXT -DPERL_IMPLICIT_SYS -DDYNAMIC_PERL
-DDYNAMIC_PERL_DLL="perl518.dll"
-I/cygdrive/c/PROGRA~2/Lua/5.1/include -I/cygdrive/c/PROGRA~2/Lua/5.1
-DFEAT_LUA -DDYNAMIC_LUA -DDYNAMIC_LUA_DLL="lua51.dll" -DFEAT_RUBY -I
/cygdrive/c/Ruby193/lib/ruby/1.9.1/i386-mingw32 -I
/cygdrive/c/Ruby193/include/ruby-1.9.1 -I
/cygdrive/c/Ruby193/include/ruby-1.9.1/i386-mingw32 -DDYNAMIC_RUBY
-DDYNAMIC_RUBY_DLL="msvcrt-ruby191.dll" -DDYNAMIC_RUBY_VER=191
-DFEAT_PYTHON -DDYNAMIC_PYTHON -DFEAT_PYTHON3 -DDYNAMIC_PYTHON3 -O3
-fomit-frame-pointer -freg-struct-return -s -mwindows -o gvim.exe
-lkernel32 -luser32 -lgdi32 -ladvapi32 -lcomdlg32 -lcomctl32 -lversion
-lwsock32 -lole32 -luuid

[Dominique Pellé]

Hi

You're using vim-7.4.827. The latest vim is vim-7.4.1261
so you're missing quite a few patches.

Since you wrote that you compiled vim yourself, could you
recompile the most recent version? It would avoid trying
to debug something that might have been fixed already.

Glancing at ftp://ftp.vim.org/pub/vim/patches/7.4/README,
I can see several crashes were solved after vim-7.4.827.
In particular, I see that your vim has Lua and a crash was
fixed for Lua (7.4.954) for example.

Regards
Dominique

[Christian Brabandt]

On Fr, 05 Feb 2016, Dominique Pellé wrote:

> You're using vim-7.4.827. The latest vim is vim-7.4.1261
> so you're missing quite a few patches.
>
> Since you wrote that you compiled vim yourself, could you
> recompile the most recent version? It would avoid trying
> to debug something that might have been fixed already.
>
> Glancing at ftp://ftp.vim.org/pub/vim/patches/7.4/README,
> I can see several crashes were solved after vim-7.4.827.
> In particular, I see that your vim has Lua and a crash was
> fixed for Lua (7.4.954) for example.

Also you can get (almost) daily binary snapshots at:
https://github.com/vim/vim-win32-installer/releases

Best,
Christian
--
Nichts läßt ein Auto schneller altern als wenn sich der Nachbar ein neues
kauft.

[A. S. Budden]

On 5 February 2016 at 17:23, Christian Brabandt <cbl...@256bit.org> wrote:
> On Fr, 05 Feb 2016, Dominique Pellé wrote:
>
>> You're using vim-7.4.827. The latest vim is vim-7.4.1261
>> so you're missing quite a few patches.
>>
>> Since you wrote that you compiled vim yourself, could you
>> recompile the most recent version? It would avoid trying
>> to debug something that might have been fixed already.
>>
>> Glancing at ftp://ftp.vim.org/pub/vim/patches/7.4/README,
>> I can see several crashes were solved after vim-7.4.827.
>> In particular, I see that your vim has Lua and a crash was
>> fixed for Lua (7.4.954) for example.
>
> Also you can get (almost) daily binary snapshots at:
> https://github.com/vim/vim-win32-installer/releases

Thank you both: I've installed the newest version and will report back
once I've tried it enough to have confidence of whether it crashes or
not.

Al

--
http://www.cgtk.co.uk

[A. S. Budden]

I've been using the newer version of Vim for a few months now and the
crashes seem to have gone, so I guess it was something that has since
been resolved. Thanks for the help.

Al