15 Feb
2018
15 Feb
'18
5:43 p.m.
I've never seen anything this bad, and it gave me a hearty laugh out
loud. I guess in my years people mostly self select toward safer
languages if they are human fuzzers.
On Wed, Feb 14, 2018 at 7:28 AM, Ron Natalie <ron(a)ronnatalie.com> wrote:
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.