| 1 |
On Sat, Apr 25, 2020 at 04:37:43PM +0000, Caveman Al Toraboran wrote: |
| 2 |
> so i really can't believe that we have devolved in |
| 3 |
> such a way where malloc/free suddenly has became a |
| 4 |
> hard concept for homo sapiens. |
| 5 |
|
| 6 |
You'd be surprised how much shocking code is out there, especially in |
| 7 |
proprietary products (the Valve Steam Client is a prime example). |
| 8 |
|
| 9 |
In general, reasons for memory-management-incompetence fall into the following |
| 10 |
categories: |
| 11 |
|
| 12 |
(a) Programmers forget. For experienced and skilled developers, this is |
| 13 |
likely the most common cause of malloc-free mismatches. I was |
| 14 |
programming in C a few years before I ever touched a computer (I |
| 15 |
bought/stole Kernighan and Ritchie from the local library and |
| 16 |
wrote out code-listings with pencil and paper), and to this day |
| 17 |
still occasionally forget to free everything I malloc. |
| 18 |
Thankfully, in the days of dynamic code-analysis tools such as |
| 19 |
Valgrind, these problems---amongst other hard-to-spot |
| 20 |
issues---become easy fixes. |
| 21 |
|
| 22 |
(b) Programmers don't care, because it is assumed the operating system |
| 23 |
will do it for them. I have heard this one quite a bit from |
| 24 |
people trying to justify their horribly written code. Often, |
| 25 |
with people who make this argument, the malloc-free mismatch is |
| 26 |
the least of their problems, however in the days of intelligent |
| 27 |
operating system-level memory-management seen in modern Linux |
| 28 |
kernels, some programmers seem to take the hard work of kernel |
| 29 |
developers as a free pass to be messy themselves. |
| 30 |
|
| 31 |
(c) Programmers don't care, because the code means nothing to them. I |
| 32 |
have never worked as a professional programmer, so I can only |
| 33 |
speculate, but from conversations with veteran developers at |
| 34 |
large companies such as Intel and Microsoft, it seems as though |
| 35 |
the general morale amongst older developers can drop hugely. Why |
| 36 |
bother optimising or thoroughly testing code when it's not |
| 37 |
yours, and you don't really care about the company for whom |
| 38 |
you're developing ? |
| 39 |
|
| 40 |
(d) Programmers are genuinely unaware of the importance of freeing their |
| 41 |
malloc'd objects. With the abundance of terrible on-line |
| 42 |
tutorials, written by teachers that seem to devote themselves to |
| 43 |
teaching the worst practices possible, I've seen an influx of |
| 44 |
programmers who are simply unaware of the need to free their |
| 45 |
memory pools. It takes less than a minute of on-line searching |
| 46 |
to find a popular tutorial on some pretty website which shows |
| 47 |
code leaking memory. |
| 48 |
|
| 49 |
So yes, it is easy to understand, but whether people _care_ or even know in the |
| 50 |
first place is entirely up to them. |
| 51 |
|
| 52 |
-- |
| 53 |
|
| 54 |
Ashley Dixon |
| 55 |
suugaku.co.uk |
| 56 |
|
| 57 |
2A9A 4117 |
| 58 |
DA96 D18A |
| 59 |
8A7B B0D2 |
| 60 |
A30E BF25 |
| 61 |
F290 A8AA |
Archives