In the article Investigating the Mysterious Field Loss Problem When Using Protobuf in C++, we analyzed how two identical proto files led to linking the wrong pb, ultimately causing some fields to be lost during deserialization. At that time, we also mentioned the process of symbol resolution, where whether it’s dynamic linking or static linking, the symbol definition from the library listed earlier is actually used. I thought I had a deep understanding of this, until I recently encountered another strange “symbol redefinition“ problem.

Learning frontend with ChatGPT as a teacher? Sounds a bit incredible, after all, frontend has a lot to do with UI, and communicating frontend with ChatGPT, which doesn’t have multimodal capabilities, seems difficult just thinking about it. However, recently, with the help of ChatGPT, I quickly wrote a Tampermonkey plugin that can copy the Latex text of mathematical formulas on ChatGPT’s chat interface.

As a backend developer with zero frontend experience, writing a Tampermonkey plugin would first require finding documentation and spending a lot of time just to write a prototype without ChatGPT. If problems were encountered in the middle, one would have to find answers on their own, which could be a very long process and might lead to giving up halfway. But with ChatGPT as a teacher, you can directly ask questions when encountering problems, making the entire development experience so much better.

Once again, I marvel at how ChatGPT really greatly expands personal technical capabilities and greatly improves personal problem-solving abilities!

Previously, I encountered a problem in actual business where Protobuf serialized messages caused storage failures. At that time, this issue almost led to a major failure, but I didn’t write an article to properly reflect on it. Recently, I encountered another Protobuf problem, and after writing Investigating the Mysterious Field Loss Problem When Using Protobuf in C++, I was reminded of the previous issue. Here, I’d like to write another article to properly introduce the pitfall I encountered last time.