Electron app crashes when storing data to system (app exited with code 3221225477)

Question

I am working on an electron app, and I'm using an the following class implementation to save and retrieve data from the user's disk. Sometimes this functions correctly, however, on occasion the program will crash and output this error.

app exited with code 3221225477

I am not too sure what is causing this issue. I understand this error code means there is an access violation occurring, but I'm not sure why that is. Potentially could be the implementation of the class. I simply took the implementation from here https://medium.com/cameron-nokes/how-to-store-user-data-in-electron-3ba6bf66bc1e

There are also occasions when this occurs randomly too, so it may not be the Store implementation.

const electron = require('electron');
const path = require('path');
const fs = require('fs');


class Store {
  constructor(opts) {
    // Renderer process has to get `app` module via `remote`, whereas the main process can get it directly
    // app.getPath('userData') will return a string of the user's app data directory path.
    const userDataPath = (electron.app || electron.remote.app).getPath('userData');
    // We'll use the `configName` property to set the file name and path.join to bring it all together as a string
    this.path = path.join(userDataPath, opts.configName + '.json');
    
    this.data = parseDataFile(this.path, opts.defaults);
  }
  
  // This will just return the property on the `data` object
  get(key) {
    const val = this.data[key];
    console.log('Get', key, val);
    return val;
  }
  
  // ...and this will set it
  set(key, val) {
    console.log('Set', key, val)
    this.data[key] = val;
    // Wait, I thought using the node.js' synchronous APIs was bad form?
    // We're not writing a server so there's not nearly the same IO demand on the process
    // Also if we used an async API and our app was quit before the asynchronous write had a chance to complete,
    // we might lose that data. Note that in a real app, we would try/catch this.
    fs.writeFileSync(this.path, JSON.stringify(this.data));
  }
}

function parseDataFile(filePath, defaults) {
  // We'll try/catch it in case the file doesn't exist yet, which will be the case on the first application run.
  // `fs.readFileSync` will return a JSON string which we then parse into a Javascript object
  try {
    return JSON.parse(fs.readFileSync(filePath));
  } catch(error) {
    // if there was some kind of error, return the passed in defaults instead.
    return defaults;
  }
}

// expose the class
module.exports = Store;

Answer 1

I seem to have discovered the reason for this issue. The following post contains a comment which says

Keep a global reference of the window object, if you don't, the window will be closed automatically when the JavaScript object is garbage collected.

https://stackoverflow.com/a/59796326/7259551

Simply making the instance of BrowserWindow a global value fixed this issue.