I spent part of this morning chasing down a bug that’s bothered me all through Paperclip’s life-cycle. I kept thinking that the problem was with me. Perhaps I wasn’t utilizing Applescript correctly. I remained stymied as I couldn’t figure out anything that would resolve the issue. Well, I think I stumbled upon the problem today. I was about to take one more shot at it before I saw this. Apparently, Applescript is crash-prone when Cocoa’s Garbage Collection is turned on. I suspect that it also crashes when Garbage Collection is merely enabled. In any case, I turned it off and haven’t had a problem since.

The worst part of this is that it’s not a consistent crash. It happens whenever it feels like. I’ve run Paperclip for several days before a crash. Other times, Paperclip will run for a few minutes. It was impossible for me to reliable diagnose and resolve since I never if I had fixed it or not (for those times when Paperclip would run for a while).

In the end, Apple still hasn’t resolved this bug. Perhaps it’s fixed in Snow Leopard (10.6). In any case, I find it rather disheartening that Apple would release Leopard with a buggy bridge between Cocoa and Applescript. Imagine, every Cocoa app built with GC can and will crash during some Applescript operation at some point. How did that get based QA?