langreiter.com plain, simple: 2004-06-16-siMem

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2004-06-16-siMem

CREATED BY chris • LAST EDITED BY chris 7464 days AGO

Joel Spolsky: "I first heard about this from one of the developers of the hit game [create 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 [create 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."

"Almost all the normal people I know are perfectly happy with web-based email, for some reason, no matter how much I try to convince them that the rich client is, uh, richer."