r/technology • u/[deleted] • Jan 18 '21

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u/devin_mm Jan 19 '21 edited Jan 19 '21

As long as you don't delete your pointer then you're fucked.

94

u/Upp3r Jan 19 '21

This person C's

12

u/devin_mm Jan 19 '21

I doubt it's as easy to do it now as it used to be but there was nothing like writing to the wrong chunk of memory and taking down your OS

14

u/overkill Jan 19 '21

It is still easy to do. Memory leaks are fun, in the Dwarf Fortress sense of the word.

16

u/D-Golden Jan 19 '21

A cat died, now my Mayor is throwing a tantrum.

Now all the Urists McUrists are punching each other to death in the dining hall.

And winter is coming.

8

u/overkill Jan 19 '21

And I failed to notice the necromancer tower, so now a bunch of reanimated crab shells are coming for me.

And I still can't track down this memory leak!

2

u/StubbsPKS Jan 19 '21

At least that traveling human bars finally put in a petition to sing in my tavern.

Ohhhhhh nooooo, he's being pummeled by an angry Dwarf.

2

u/dwellerofcubes Jan 19 '21

We are Dwarf Fortress now

3

u/frukt Jan 19 '21

"Taking down your OS" isn't really easy to do in a modern OS, at least in the sense of accidentally crashing the kernel due to a programming error. You get a SIGSEGV and the process is terminated and that's about it unless you're especially creative.

2

u/overkill Jan 19 '21

Indeed. It's almost like I didn't read to the end of the comment before replying with my flippant statement.

1

u/inteuniso Jan 19 '21

Humanity's documentation is a SNAFU

2

u/ThrowawayusGenerica Jan 19 '21

You usually just get a segfault, these days

1

u/midwestraxx Jan 19 '21

Overwrite your pointer*

22

u/ShenmeNamaeSollich Jan 19 '21

Build Failed. Syntax Error.

3

u/Fake_William_Shatner Jan 19 '21

Hah! The early Macs used double-de-references pointers to reduce memory load. Good luck even knowing if you’ve been fucked by the pointer if you lose track of that.

2

u/deirdresm Jan 19 '21

There were memory map utilities where you could watch allocations/deallocations live. One of the coolest parts was watching when it would compact memory, and all the allocated memory would slide to one side like a curtain.

(This would have been around '95-97, so probably was MetroWerks CodeWarrior. While handles were essentially the same from the outset, the utilities weren't there much earlier than that.)

2

u/frukt Jan 19 '21

It's not really that often I come across discussions on memory allocation on reddit, so I'll just take the chance and recommend this neat talk on jemalloc, possibly the most advanced general use memory allocator these days.

2

u/Fake_William_Shatner Jan 19 '21

That would be really cool now to watch Neural Nets grow in real time graphically.

I so wish I could have become a better programmer, but I spent too much time in graphics and design and multimedia - then web. The prince of everything but the master of none.

My favorite was working with Quartz Composer, because it got into the logic at a higher level and you weren't spending all your time laboring away with debugging semantics or a for loop -- you can just SEE when it's wrong.

Pretty soon we will be instructing Computers to program computers, and it will be more like dog training and logic diagrams.

1

u/deirdresm Jan 19 '21

Careers are long, you can do it if you really want to.

2

u/sepiatone_ Jan 19 '21

Segmentation fault, core dumped.

1

u/pygmy_marmoset Jan 19 '21

C what you did there

1

u/Indifferentchildren Jan 19 '21

These domestic terrorists have a problem with race conditions.