I have no idea what's causing it, but sometimes Visual Studio Code just won't launch on Linux. This is on Ubuntu 17.10, but the issue was also present in Ubuntu 17.04.
I'm running VS Code 1.18.1.
Running "code" in Terminal gives zero output when this happens too.
I have no idea where to get the debug logs for the crash, but this popped up today: https://i.stack.imgur.com/jZDa2.jpg (screenshots of Ubuntu error reporter)strong text
This is some odd backtrace. I see calloc() which calls… __start_google_malloc()! At first I even thought that backtrace is upside down, but probably it's alright. They probably have used their own calloc() function. In particular I don't see there a path to glibc where the "common" calloc() resides.
Anyways, what I can tell you from the backtrace — the crash happens somewhere deep in their own app, so it's a bug in VS Code. You can either build VS Code with debug symbols to find out what's wrong yourself, or report a bug to their github.
Running "code" in Terminal gives zero output when this happens too.
Yeah, it's a typical design flaw of all electron-based apps, they run lots of processes for no reason, and do not redirect the output to stdout/stderr. If you're lucky enough, you can try to connect to the process using gdb and pgrep -f before it gets crashed. It would pause the process, then you can use continue to, well, continue; and when it gets crashed you can use ls -l /proc/processpid/fd to view all files opened by the debuggee — hopefully one of them would be the log in which case you'll see a symlink in the output.
It's interesting though that Electron is based on Chromium, which runs lots of processes too (it have a reason though). But terminal output in the original Chromium does work! So does it in all QtWebEngine-based apps (which is also a framework based on Chromium). I am curious how did Electron manage to break it.
