Weird bug -- linux related?

Hi, I am new to the forums, so if this is not the right place for this, please do let me know. I checked out the bug report section first, but it seems they need to be able to exactly reproduce the bug, but that does not seem to be possible.

SHORT VERSION

After leaving Unity open over night, my pathfinding algorithm stopped working. The error was finally resolved by re-inserting the public variables in the inspector. I'm curious if this bug is related to linux (I am using Ubuntu 19.10), and if anyone else has come across it. It is troublesome if something like this could happen in a bigger project.

MORE DETAILED VERSION

For context, I am writing a pathfinding algorithm (just simple Dijkstra searching a grid). My "worldGrid" object has a script on it called

GridContainer

, which assumes all the children of worldGrid have a

GridItem

component, and stores them in a member variable list

List<GridItem> children

.

Code (CSharp):

1.  void FindChildren(){
2.         children=new List<GridItem>();
3.         foreach(Transform child in transform){
4.             children.Add(child.GetComponent<GridItem>());
5.         }
6.     }

My

PathFinder

component is also on the worldGrid object, and has two public variables that I assign through the inspector:

Code (CSharp):

1. public GridItem begin;
2. public GridItem end;

Where

begin

and

end

are the begin and end points for which a path must be found. Since the Dijkstra algorithm works with nodes, I defined a class inside the

PathFinder

class, called

Node

(I assume there are classes already available for this, but that should not be related to the bug), where

Node

has a reference to a

GridItem gridItem

, and reference to the previous node

Node prev

(which is set to null by default). Now, for the algorithm I need to make a

Node

for every

GridItem

, which I do as follows:

Code (CSharp):

1. Dictionary<GridItem, Node> allNodes=new Dictionary<GridItem,Node>();
2.         foreach(GridItem gridItem in gridContainer.children){
3.             allNodes.Add(gridItem, new Node(gridItem));
4.         }

So this Dictionary is basically just an array with the

GridItem

as the key, the logic behind it being that if I need to find the

Node

for

begin

or

end

, I can simply do

Code (CSharp):

1. Node node=allNodes[begin]

or

Code (CSharp):

1. Node endNode=allNodes[end]

This worked exactly as I had intended, and the algorithm was working fine last night before I went to bed. When I woke up and run it again (without changing anything) suddenly my pathfinding failed. I was receiving an error that said that there was no key for the Dictionary for

Node endNode=allNodes[end]

. I started the debugger, looked at the Dictionary, and saw that there was a

GridItem

key in the Dictionary with the exact same name as

end

, but it was still saying that there was no key. I then logged the

GetInstanceID()

of the

end

and all the

GridItem

s of the

allNodes

List, and saw that

end

had an id of about 2000, where all the

GridItems

s had ids of about 4000. So I went to the editor re-dragged the object from the Hierarhcy into the

end

field in the inspector, and bam, everything worked again. I assume that if I had restarted Unity, that would've fixed the problem too.

So my understanding is that after leaving Unity on over the night, the value in the inspector for

end

became a copy of the original object, rather than a reference. It took me about 40 mins to figure out what was going on, and this is a super tiny project, and I worry for something like this happening in a large project. So has anyone else encountered something like this?