What does 8badf00d mean?

Question

Sometimes my iPhone application crashes with a weird crashlog, that reads exception code is 0x8badf00d. The stacktraces show random snapshots of app execution, but nothing suspicious. This happens very rarely and I'm not able to find out how to reproduce it. Does anybody know more about this kind of exception and exception code?

Here is an excerpt from my crashlogs:

Exception Type: 00000020
Exception Codes: 0x8badf00d
Highlighted Thread: 0

Application Specific Information:
Failed to deactivate

Thread 0:
...
< nothing suspicious here >
...

Unknown thread crashed with unknown flavor: 5, state_count: 1

Answer 1

ate bad food ??

Answer 2

It's a failure code added by a dev with a good sense of humor. Because hexadecimal uses letters as well as numbers, it's possible to come up with hex numbers that look approximately like english words, such as "0xdeadbeef", etc. I'm sure that the exception has a specific meaning, but if there's no major symptoms associated with it, you can probably ignore it without too much concern.

Answer 3

It's some programmer's idea of a joke. You have to pick a number for your code, but the number doesn't necessarily mean anything in itself. 8badf00d is just another way to write the number 2,343,432,205, and was chosen because it looks 'funny' when represented in hex for an exception log.

Answer 4

It is HexSpeak, see here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexspeak

Answer 5

0x8badf00d is the error code that the watchdog raises when an application takes too long to launch or terminate. See Apple's Crash Reporting for iPhone OS Applications document