C# Memory Leak Torpedoed Princeton's DARPA Chances

nil0lab writes "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.'"

Comments

Re:As a C kernel programmer...

[ozzee]

That's why there are no memory leaks in C/C++ code

The last few large projects I have worked on with C++ had no issues with memory leaks on product release and these were servers that run for months. Proper use of smart pointers and correctly designed classes is not that hard. The last Java based product I worked on had all kinds of leaks and issues.

Re:I'll show you mine if you..

[Pope]

What did Riker find on Picard's web site? Captain's blog.