This used to be Microsoft's shtick, Joel Spolsky wrote an amazing article related to this a few years ago: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microso

This used to be Microsoft's shtick, Joel Spolsky wrote an amazing article related to this a few years ago: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost-the-api-war/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost... Relevant excerpt (abridged): > I first heard about this from one of the developers of the hit game SimCity, who told me that there was a critical bug in his application: it used memory right after freeing it, a major no-no that happened to work OK on DOS ... the Windows developers ... added special code that checked if SimCity was running, and if it did, ran the memory allocator in a special mode in which you could still use memory after freeing it.