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Closest thing I can find is from Joel Spolsky: I first heard about this from one of the developers of the hit game SimCity, who told me that there was a critic
by solidsnack9000 6y ago
Closest thing I can find is from Joel Spolsky:
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 but would not work under Windows where memory that is freed is likely to be snatched up by another running application right away. The testers on the Windows team were going through various popular applications, testing them to make sure they worked OK, but SimCity kept crashing. They reported this to the Windows developers, who disassembled SimCity, stepped through it in a debugger, found the bug, and 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.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost-the-api-war/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost...
- radmuzom 6y agoYes I could not find the original link too. Closest I could find is (the link mentioned in the paragraph below is broken) - "Interesting defense. While Chen has a good point about Microsoft taking the blame unfairly over this and perhaps similar issues its not like Microsoft is renown for their code quality. Indeed, check out an item in J.B. Surveyer's Keep an Open Eye blog from September 2004 which details how Chen's team added code to allow Windows to work around a bug in Sim City!" https://www.networkworld.com/article/2356556/microsoft-code-taking-the-blame.html https://www.networkworld.com/article/2356556/microsoft-code-...
- quietbritishjim 6y agoHere you go: https://web.archive.org/web/20070114082053/http://www.theopensourcery.com/wordp1/index.php?p=87 https://web.archive.org/web/20070114082053/http://www.theope... It actually refers back to the Joel on Software blog post in the comment above.