Several times you need to pass data (including text) from cross-platform C++ code to platform-specific C++ code. If you don't pay enough attention, weird bugs can happen at the boundary.

The Case of the Two Billion Characters Long String

by Giovanni Dicanio

From the article:

What is going on here? What is the origin of this bug? Why is the string reported as being more than 2 billion characters long?

Let's try to solve this mystery, with a sprinkle of assembly language, too!