A few reasons have been previously discussed: plenty of diff viewers highlight non-standard characters being a big one, the other bit being if someone does see this error it seems entirely plausible as a
mistake.
Choosing something atypical in a way that is clearly trying to be invisible rather than being an accident will draw a lot more attention than “oops I must have typo’d it”
It was checking if the C compiled to detect the landlock feature, and there was a single character in the middle of the code that made it always fail to compile and therefore silently leave the feature disabled.
Comments
This is just spectacular. Evil, of course, but spectacular nevertheless.
why bother with a . instead of a   or some other unicode hackdodgery?
A few reasons have been previously discussed: plenty of diff viewers highlight non-standard characters being a big one, the other bit being if someone does see this error it seems entirely plausible as a mistake.
Choosing something atypical in a way that is clearly trying to be invisible rather than being an accident will draw a lot more attention than “oops I must have typo’d it”
Thread from yesterday (221 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39874404
Can you spot the intentional bug in this commit?
It was checking if the C compiled to detect the landlock feature, and there was a single character in the middle of the code that made it always fail to compile and therefore silently leave the feature disabled.