On Sat, Apr 25, 2020 at 04:37:43PM +0000, Caveman Al Toraboran wrote:
> so i really can't believe that we have devolved in
> such a way where malloc/free suddenly has became a
> hard concept for homo sapiens.

You'd  be  surprised  how  much  shocking  code  is  out  there,  especially  in
proprietary  products  (the  Valve   Steam   Client   is   a   prime   example).

In general, reasons for memory-management-incompetence fall into  the  following
categories:

        (a) Programmers forget.  For experienced and skilled developers, this is
                likely the most common cause of malloc-free mismatches.   I  was
                programming in C a few years before I ever touched a computer (I
                bought/stole Kernighan and Ritchie from the  local  library  and
                wrote out code-listings with pencil and paper), and to this  day
                still  occasionally  forget  to  free   everything   I   malloc.
                Thankfully, in the days of dynamic code-analysis tools  such  as
                Valgrind,   these    problems---amongst    other    hard-to-spot
                issues---become easy fixes.

        (b) Programmers don't care, because it is assumed the  operating  system
                will do it for them.  I have heard this one  quite  a  bit  from
                people trying to justify their horribly  written  code.   Often,
                with people who make this argument, the malloc-free mismatch  is
                the least of their problems, however in the days of  intelligent
                operating system-level memory-management seen  in  modern  Linux
                kernels, some programmers seem to take the hard work  of  kernel
                developers  as   a   free   pass   to   be   messy   themselves.

        (c) Programmers don't care, because the code means nothing to  them.   I
                have never worked as a professional programmer, so  I  can  only
                speculate, but from conversations  with  veteran  developers  at
                large companies such as Intel and Microsoft, it seems as  though
                the general morale amongst older developers can drop hugely. Why
                bother optimising or  thoroughly  testing  code  when  it's  not
                yours, and you don't really care  about  the  company  for  whom
                you're developing ?

        (d) Programmers are genuinely unaware of the importance of freeing their
                malloc'd  objects.   With  the  abundance  of  terrible  on-line
                tutorials, written by teachers that seem to devote themselves to
                teaching the worst practices possible, I've seen  an  influx  of
                programmers who are simply unaware of the  need  to  free  their
                memory pools.  It takes less than a minute of on-line  searching
                to find a popular tutorial on some pretty  website  which  shows
                code leaking memory.

So yes, it is easy to understand, but whether people _care_ or even know in  the
first place is entirely up to them.

-- 

Ashley Dixon
suugaku.co.uk

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