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Re: [News] [Rival] Don't let .NET drive your car ... it "leaks"

On Sat, 17 Nov 2007 17:20:06 -0600, Erik Funkenbusch
<erik@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Sat, 17 Nov 2007 22:32:50 +0000, [H]omer wrote:
>> Verily I say unto thee, that Jerry McBride spake thusly:
>>> Erik Funkenbusch wrote:

> It's not a "blogger", it's an advertisement.

It's a personal citation from Bryan Cattle, a DARPA Grand Challenge team
member, irrespective of how it is being used by The Code Project.

>>> So you need a thirdparty profiler to find out that the cutting 
>>> edge programming language is full of "memory issues"...What's the
>>> point? Microsoft C# is still full of memory leaks... That's the
>>> point!
>> 
>> Like the blogger states, this is exactly the kind of thing C# is 
>> supposed to prevent.
> 
> No, it's not.  If you believe that, you haven't any clue what garbage
> collection actually means.

What *I* "believe" is not the issue, it's what Bryan Cattle believes:

.----
| It was the closest thing to a memory leak that you can have in a
| "managed" language. C# manages your memory for you by watching the
| objects you create. When your code no longer maintains any
| reference to the object, it automatically gets flagged for deletion
| without the programmer needing to manually free the memory, as they
| would need to do in C or C++. Hence, in order to be allocating
| memory that is never freed in C#, you need to somehow be
| referencing an object in a way that you don't know about.
`----

This is not about whether or not Microsoft is to blame for a third
party's sloppy code, it's about whether or not the C# garbage collector
actually does what it's supposed to, and the typical quality of code
that results - given C# developers' expectations.

If Bryan Cattle's assertions are wrong, then by all means tell /him/ not
me, the messenger. However, it's *results* that matter, and in this case
the result speaks for itself:

.----
| We profiled the memory usage and saw the obstacle list blowing up.
| How could this be? We called "delete" on those old obstacles! To
| our amazement, it was only minutes before we realized that our list
| of detected obstacles was never getting garbage collected. Though
| we thought we had cleared all references to old entries in the
| list, because the objects were still registered as subscribers to
| an event, they were never getting deleted.
|
| [...]
|
| ANTS Profiler helped us fix a problem in minutes that would have
| taken us weeks to track down. If only we'd thought of it before the
| competition, we would most likely have finished the entire race and
| had a chance at the top prize money.
`----

> I hope you don't write code.

Certainly not in C#, and I never will.

I hope /you/ don't write code, since you'd undoubtedly spend your time
criticising the /users/ when they complain that it fails, rather than
examining your own failures. God help them.

-- 
K.
http://slated.org

.----
| "[Microsoft] are willing to lose money for years and years just to
|  make sure that you don't make any money, either." - Bob Cringely.
|  - http://blog.businessofsoftware.org/2007/07/cringely-the-un.html
`----

Fedora release 7 (Moonshine) on sky, running kernel 2.6.22.9-91.fc7
 02:18:37 up 6 days, 23:12,  1 user,  load average: 0.15, 0.30, 0.40

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