Vocabulary Pop Quiz - Memory Leak

Close enough!

In two words, bad programming!

That was just too easy!

You forgot to give him a, " atta boy " .

"In object-oriented programming, a memory leak may happen when an object is stored in memory but cannot be accessed by the running code. ... Because they can exhaust available system memory as an application runs, memory leaks are often the cause of or a contributing factor to software aging."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_leak

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/davidklinems/2005/11/16/three-common-causes-of-memory-leaks-in-managed-applications/

You got it, but a more general definition is:

Failing to unallocate (free) memory when the memory is no longer required.

(To the OP):

The reason it's called a 'memory leak' is that when the function is called again, it allocates a new block of memory, but fails to unallocate it when it's done, so now there are TWO chunks of 'abandoned' allocated memory. As the process repeats, it creates an effect as if the memory were 'leaking out of a hole in the computer case.'

It's when you forget where you put stuff.

I thought a memory leak happened when you return to the watering hole at your alma mater and relieved yourself. There you find the same old jokes on the wall. Ah memories, I wonder whatever happened to Anita?

"I wonder whatever happened to Anita?"

She's probably a grandmother of three, with wrinkles and grey hair in a bun.

Some modern computer memory systems use liquid cooling, so depending on who you talk to a memory leak could be a leak in the coolant system.

Computer programs must allocate memory space to store data. When the program is finished with that data, that space needs to be freed up so that other data can be stored. (The computer has only so much memory to work with.)

When there is a program error where some of the allocated space is not freed up, what happens is that as more and more space is allocated than is freed up, the computer runs out of memory space to allocate. This error is referred to as a "Memory Leak".

I think that is actually bad garbage collection, rather than a memory leak. I prefer the definition of a memory leak as the storage of data in a block of memory already allocated for some other purpose.

In C and C++ it's up to the programmer to allocate and free memory space, and it's what we've called a memory leak when more and more storage is allocated and not freed up.

(I do realize Java takes care of all that, when it gets around to it, and I can program in Java when I absolutely have to, but prefer the control of C or C++. )

A program with a memory leak seems to run fine until the operating system runs out of RAM and starts swapping out disk space at which point performance slows to a crawl.

Just my experience...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_leak

Been there, done that. Have a "dead man relay" set to trip the safety system when that happens. It is nice to be able to stop the machine automatically when it looses its mind.

"I prefer the definition of a memory leak as the storage of data in a block of memory already allocated for some other purpose."

I respect that you prefer that definition.

I also respect that some people prefer the singular of potatoes to be potatoe.

However, those two things have something in common: They are both wrong.

What you are describing is not called a "memory leak" it is called "overwriting data," "overloading data" (as in the new data is LOADED into memory OVER the old data), "program corruption" (as a portion of memory that held something important now holds essentially random junk), or a "worm" (when used to overwrite past the end of a buffer and sneak malicious code into a program, this came about early in the internet days, when e-mail systems were still crude and simple. a message with a too-long file would write past the end of the assigned buffer space since the e-mail program at the time did not have strong error checking, and the 'extra data' could end up in 'executable space' and get flagged as a program ready to run.)

The new "PC" term for dementia.