C# "memory leak?" Uhm, no...

by Administrator 17. November 2007 16:34

I suppose it's going to be fashionable to slam Microsoft until the end of time.  Check out this headline at Slashdot, which I have generaly enjoyed for 9 years or so:

Developers: C# Memory Leak Torpedoed Princeton's DARPA Chances

"In a case of 20/20 hindsight, Princeton DARPA Grand Challenge team member Bryan Cattle reflects on how their code failed to forget obstacles it had passed. It was written in Microsoft's C#, which isn't supposed to let you have memory leaks. 'We kept noticing that the computer would begin to bog down after extended periods of driving. This problem was pernicious because it only showed up after 40 minutes to an hour of driving around and collecting obstacles. The computer performance would just gradually slow down until the car just simply stopped responding, usually with the gas pedal down, and would just drive off into the bush until we pulled the plug. We looked through the code on paper, literally line by line, and just couldn't for the life of us imagine what the problem was.'"

Damn Microsoft and their bad products!  Why doesn't everyone just get a Mac so things will "just work"?  The commentary by the team that wrote the code is a bit more telling:

http://www.codeproject.com/showcase/IfOnlyWedUsedANTSProfiler.asp

So, the problem was not C#, but a bit of confusion in that subscribing to an event keeps a reference to the subscriber in memory, hence no objects can be deleted.  So this issue would occur in pretty much any modern managed programming language.  Am I wrong to occasionally be miffed at the constant misrepresentation of Microsoft's excellent developer technologies?

Tags:

Pingbacks and trackbacks (1)+

Add comment




  Country flag
biuquote
  • Comment
  • Preview
Loading


About the author

Damon Payne is a Microsoft MVP specializing in Smart Client solution architecture. 

INETA Community Speakers Program

Month List

Page List

flickr photostream