Is there a difference between a bug and a glitch? If there is, and you can pinpoint what it is, what is it?
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@Felthry I think a glitch might be a bug used for Fun Stuff like speedrunning?
@Felthry the term glitch also has a specific electrical meaning, of an electrical circuit output state that is transient that doesn't lay linearly between the start and end state of a circuit's outputs, but which *could potentially occur or be sampled*. A counter which goes from 7 to 15 to 8 if you're reading its outputs too quickly would be "glitchy". Some circuit models can go 0-1-0 in zero time. Also a glitch. I generally agree with "bug is code error, glitch is software symptom" meaning.
@Felthry a bug is an error in design that leads to unwanted behavior.
A glitch is what happens when complex systems exhibit unexpected and unwanted behavior due to unforseen interactions of components.
@Felthry I think I tend to consider a bug a problem which occurs because the logic of a computer program (or its operating system or whatnot) is flawed, while a glitch is something that happens because of the hardware it's on. Like, if you ran your code on the Platonic Ideal of the Commodore 64 and it still happens, it's a bug; if it doesn't happen, it's a glitch.
This without the complication of code that exploits glitches to do stuff on purpose, like any Atari 2600 game made after 1981.
@Austin_Dern now i wonder if the platonic ideal of the c64 would include the fourth sound channel or not
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@Felthry Or the save-with-replace bug, come to think of it!
@Austin_Dern we're not familiar with that one.
also don't know what you're referring to in the atari 2600, actually
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@Austin_Dern come to think of it, the distinction between hardware and software is a bit blurred with cartridge games
people would think of the cartridge for, say, star fox as being a medium for holding the software because that's what rom cartridges were originally meant for
but the star fox cartridge also contains the superFX coprocessor, without which it won't work
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@Felthry Yeah, this is another aspect of cartridge games that makes it impossible to make a perfect and unambiguous divide between bug and glitch.
@Felthry The save-with-replace bug happened because the single-disk-drive 1541 was a hacked version of the earlier two-drive 4040, and some conditions could make the 1541 think it should be using the nonexistent second drive. Would a Platonic 1541 suffer such glitches?
The Atari 2600 reference is to nothing specific, just that experienced programmers learned how to do things seemingly beyond the system's abilities, often by using glitches in clever ways.
@Austin_Dern oh, most of what we know about the 1541 is that it was ridiculously slow because they couldn't manage to finish the parallel communication by launch so it did it one bit at a time and they couldn't speed it up on later models without breaking compatibility so commodore disk drives were just extremely slow
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@Austin_Dern also it wrote some weird bespoke format but every drive of that era did, there was no concept of cross-compatibility
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@Felthry Yeah. It was a goofy and ramshackle era. But lovable in its weird way.
@Felthry To a first approximation:
- a bug is a computer program which contradicts how it theoretically should
- a glitch is a bug that gets used intentionally for purpose
I think
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our answer to this, if you're curious, is that they mean the same thing, but calling it a bug has implications that it's less significant, and calling it a glitch implies that it's more significant
In the context of video games, "the life counter doesn't render correctly for a few frames after you get a 1-up" would be a bug, and "the HUD disappears and doesn't return until you reboot the game if you get a bonus time pickup on the same frame the timer runs out" would be a glitch
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