Thread by @migueldeicaza

This reminded me of another story.

We used to know this incredibly talented software programmer that was an artist, a genius, a visionary, and very strongly opinionated. He was ahead of his time. 1/

He truly created beautiful universes out of thin air in the computer, and this was back in 1997 or so when computers were slower, had fewer resources, and were very constrained.

He made magic happen on those old clunkers 2/

He loved programming in C, and was not very good at housekeeping. For those that do not know, C is a language where 90% of your time is spent being a pedantic accountant and performing housekeeping duties. 2/

His programming style was also unique. It got the job done but had an aesthetic that only a mother could love. So he drove a lot of collaborators crazy 3/

The code was often a source of memory leaks, and security holes. We had just accepted that someone would go and do a cleanup job afterwards 4/

One day, in those early Linux days, some memory debugger became available, and we started to actively fix memory leaks introduced by our general lack of hygiene and housekeeping duties. But his code, his code was the worst offender, it was going to take months to fix 5/

Yet the very day that we reported the issue, he fixed every single memory leak. Nobody could believe this, but the tool did not lie.

We could not believe it, because housekeeping in C, often requires a careful review and a balancing act, which took time to check. 6/

Anyways, we cracked open the fix, and we found what he had done.

He implemented a wrapper to the memory allocator. It merely kept track of every allocation in a list, and he freed all the objects before his code terminated, ensuring there would be no leaks reported. end/