5 ms·
Most Memory Leaks are Good
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- smackfu 15y agoI was expecting this to be an essay on how memory leaks are good because they expose code bugs that only are exposed in long-running code, that would never be found normally or in unit testing.
- eis 15y agoMemory leaks are not good, ever. The author just has a wrong definition of memory leak. A memory leak is any memory that is allocated, but never freed This is not a memory leak in most people's books. A real memory leak is memory that is allocated, not used anymore by the application and never freed. This is a small but important difference. What the author described as "good memory leak" is just allocated memory.
- jerrya 15y agoMisleading headline , but a nice, and useful, anecdote about the techniques they used to find a memory leak, ending with a good explanation of why the typical ruby tools would not be able to find it.
- zwieback 15y agoWow, I had never really appreciated the fact that people working in GCed languages had to deal with memory leaks. One of the things I enjoy in the limited time I work away from C and C++ is not having to worry about memory leaks but I guess it can happen depending on the complexity of the system and what you're plumbing together. I'm wondering, though, is there no way to point back at the code that did the allocation? We used to instrument our heap management routines to give us whatever info we need to figure out who the offending allocator is, e.g. functions, line numbers, thread IDs, etc.