From: ron@ronnatalie.com (Ron Natalie)
Subject: [TUHS] Clueless programmers
Date: Wed, 14 Feb 2018 09:28:50 -0500 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <005301d3a5a0$226410d0$672c3270$@ronnatalie.com> (raw)
> already 20 years ago I met a guy (masters degree, university) who never freed dynamically allocated memory. He told me he is 'instantiating a object', but had no idea what an heap is, and what dynamically allocated memory means.
Years ago, I had an new programmer who I just couldn't teach. He never understood the difference between an array and pointer, and apparently couldn't be bothered to learn.
After string him along for three months, I was on my way into his office to fire him when I found out he had quit, but not before he checked a bunch of drek into our source code control system.
I thought I backed all his commits out at the time.
Years later I was running "purify" on our product looking for memory leaks. I found this small utility function that predated the source code control system leaking. This, I thought was odd, as it had been there FOREVER and was well tested. I brought up the source code system and checked it anyhow and found the afore mentioned programmer had checked in one change: he deleted the "free" call in it.
I KNOW what happened. He did something else to corrupt the malloc heap in his code and often this causes a core dump in a subsequent malloc/free call. Apparently this was the place it struck him, so he just deleted the free call there.
next reply other threads:[~2018-02-14 14:28 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 7+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2018-02-14 14:28 Ron Natalie [this message]
2018-02-14 22:07 ` George Michaelson
2018-02-14 23:50 ` Dave Horsfall
2018-02-15 2:42 ` George Michaelson
2018-02-15 11:43 ` Kevin Bowling
2018-02-16 15:54 Rudi Blom
2018-02-16 16:32 ` Larry McVoy
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