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Mopping Up Mozilla Memory Leaks

Posted by Hemos on from the code-janitors-unite dept.

mouseman writes "Geodesic Systems, a maker of memory management/debugging software, has a live demo of their Linux product running on the Mozilla nightly builds. It's pretty damn slick -- it detects memory leaks and can show where in the code the leaked memory was allocated and actually recover (GC) the leaked memory. The Mozilla reports actually look pretty good, which jibes with my own impressions of how much it has improved -- see for yourself."

2 of 280 comments (clear)

  1. Just what they need... by Sorthum · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Wish they'd come out with a port for Win32. I've had more programs (usually file sharing services) eat up both memory and processor cycles to the point that everything came to a standstill.

  2. Who needs garbage collection? by Peaker · · Score: 3, Insightful

    "How hard is it to manage pointers and free your memory allocations anyways?"

    (To those who didn't get it, I was being cynical)

    That is the response I usually get when advising to write using high-level languages that take care of memory management. Finding enormous leakage in huge programs almost proves this response wrong. Finding leakage in almost all programs definitely proves it wrong, and you sure will find leakage in almost every large program written in a low-level language like C or C++.

    The overuse of low-level languages with increasingly powerful hardware is becoming appearant to more and more people. It seems the "dark side" will be out of the low-level language hell sooner, as Micros~1 is pushing C# and .NET with all their marketing strength.

    If you don't want the Linux/*nix world to stay behind, stop using C and C++ where Python and Lisp can be used. Writing in C or C++ instead of a higher-level language can be deemed as a premature optimization, as any specific part of the program can be optimized and written in C when necessary. We all know how evil premature optimization is.

    If you write in C or C++ because that's simply what you know, you should not be wary of learning new languages. You should know that C++ is extremely hellish to learn, while Java is a lot simpler, and Python takes at most a day or two!

    From my own personal exprience, functional languages are a bit more difficult to learn and grasp, but it seems they perfectly fit some mindsets.

    Stop wasting human power on writing destructors and freeing unused memory, when it can all be done automatically.