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Got a chuckle out of this. "Jon Ross, who wrote the original version of SimCity for Windows 3.x, told me that he accidentally left a bug in SimCity where he re
by luthfur 5y ago
Got a chuckle out of this.
"Jon Ross, who wrote the original version of SimCity for Windows 3.x, told me that he accidentally left a bug in SimCity where he read memory that he had just freed. Yep. It worked fine on Windows 3.x, because the memory never went anywhere. Here’s the amazing part: On beta versions of Windows 95, SimCity wasn’t working in testing. Microsoft tracked down the bug and added specific code to Windows 95 that looks for SimCity. If it finds SimCity running, it runs the memory allocator in a special mode that doesn’t free memory right away."
How many of us had to hardcode those one off "if" blocks to handle an annoying special case and get the damned thing shipped. Maybe the section has a nice TODO comment that stays in the repo for posterity. No one wants to take the effort to clean it up lest there be a hidden dependency somewhere that would break.