Application startup: "panic: runtime error: invalid memory address or nil pointer dereference"

Describe the bug

I received an error popup the moment Github Desktop started up. It did not crash, I just OK-ed out of the error message and everything continued to work fine. I do not know what could have caused this to happen.

Error from the log file which contains the dialog message and a little extra before info:

2021-01-23T01:42:04.814Z - info: [ui] [AppStore] loading 7 repositories from store
2021-01-23T01:42:04.815Z - info: [ui] [AppStore] found account: ariffjeff (ariffjeff)
2021-01-23T01:42:04.815Z - info: [ui] [AppStore] found account: arj14008 (Ariff Jeff)
2021-01-23T01:42:05.080Z - info: [ui] launching: 2.6.2 (Windows 10.0.19041)
2021-01-23T01:42:05.080Z - info: [ui] execPath: 'C:\Users\ariff\AppData\Local\GitHubDesktop\app-2.6.2\GitHubDesktop.exe'
2021-01-23T01:42:05.165Z - error: [ui] `git lfs install --skip-repo` exited with an unexpected code: 2.
stderr:
panic: runtime error: invalid memory address or nil pointer dereference
[signal 0xc0000005 code=0x0 addr=0x1 pc=0x786287]

goroutine 1 [running]:
golang.org/x/text/unicode/bidi.Lookup(0xc0001c5d64, 0x1, 0x4, 0xb, 0x1)
	go/pkg/mod/golang.org/x/text@v0.3.0/unicode/bidi/prop.go:89 +0x2f7
golang.org/x/text/unicode/bidi.LookupRune(0x1, 0xb, 0x1)
	go/pkg/mod/golang.org/x/text@v0.3.0/unicode/bidi/prop.go:64 +0x7f
golang.org/x/text/secure/bidirule.init.0()
	go/pkg/mod/golang.org/x/text@v0.3.0/secure/bidirule/bidirule.go:252 +0x35

Version & OS

Version 2.6.2 Windows 10 Pro

Steps to reproduce the behavior

I started up VS Code first, then opened GitHub Desktop while VS Code was starting up, then immediately alt-tabbed to another application the very moment the GitHub Desktop application window opened. I can’t see how this would cause this error though, but that’s what I did.

The error only occurred once. I cannot reproduce the problem.

[fredcadete]

This could be a git-lfs issue. I am seeing the same error intermittently when doing “git lfs pull”. This in CI, not involving the desktop client.

[steveward]

Thanks for the detailed report @ariffjeff! I’m going to close this out since it seems to be a one-off error (and to help keep our open issues manageable), but I appreciate you opening this for reference in case any other users encounter this error in the future.