Re: Newbie question on malloc()

[Jan-Benedict Glaw <jbglaw@lug-owl.de>]

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On Fri, 2004-06-04 02:44:57 +0300, Micha Feigin <michf@post.tau.ac.il>
wrote in message <20040603234457.GK2562@luna.mooo.com>:
> On Thu, Jun 03, 2004 at 09:42:51PM +0200, Jan-Benedict Glaw wrote:
> > Read again. There ARE (or at least: were) operating systems that
> > intentionally did *not* implicitely free memory. If an application
> > missed to free all allocated memory, it's lost. Forever.
> 
> Single process operating systems could get away with doing that. Multi
> process operating systems (and most modern ones are) can't afford that
> luxury as it will allow one misbehaving process to kill the system
> (maybe win 3 could get away with that as it was a cooperative multi
> tasking system as opposed to a properly scheduled one and dynamic memory
> there was a very sick thing using handles)
> 
> Maybe some special purpose embedded systems will do that to reduce
> overhead but they will be hard to find probably.

Right you are, as I am:) I don't claim that today's most common OSes
don't reclaim memory - they do. But there have been (and for sure
they're still used) special-purpose operating systems that don't do
that. It's like "all cars to have four wheels". At least in Italia,
you'll commonly see cars with three wheels:) Special purpose, but they
exist...

MfG, JBG

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