Comments on Bad Stream, No Consciousness: Math or Common Sense?

Ah! The joys of memory leaks :) Well, in addition...

2009-05-10T01:25:00.000+05:30

Ah! The joys of memory leaks :)

Well, in addition to math and common sense, may I suggest another option? Engineering.

1. Custom memory management: Having your own memory manager that for example, uses an arena allocation scheme could ensure that you can gracefully handle OOM cases, per 'sub-task' as you said (by giving each task it's own arena). Also, there is the benefit that you don't have to go re-write your entire codebase to handle OOM. You could just have your manager override libc's *alloc calls and put in all your graceful handling there.

2. A really brave (difficult but most effective?) solution would be to implement gargbage collection. It really makes sense in memory constrained environments. And no - it's not as performance-expensive as it used to be. There has been tonnes of research on making gc faster and there are practical solutions that work very well.

Admittedly, No. 2 is very ambitious and may not be feasible - but I think No. 1 is just a couple of man-week's of work at worst.

As for the case that you mentioned always succeeds - in a really constrained+leaking environment, it's likely that your blocking call will block infinitely, which is as bad as, if not worse than, crashing - don't you think?

do you just want me to re-read it or did you want ...

2009-05-08T15:04:00.000+05:30

do you just want me to re-read it or did you want to make a point there? I didn't get your last comment...Maybe you didn't get my point then :)

Quoting from my "Common Sense" paragraph: "You s...

2009-05-08T13:05:00.000+05:30

Quoting from my "Common Sense" paragraph:

"You still may need to do some sizing - but this would just be to ensure that you do not hit out of memory conditions very frequently and nothing more than that"

I think I'm missing something here, but shouldn't ...

2009-05-08T11:42:00.000+05:30

I think I'm missing something here, but shouldn't it the ideal situation be "Math + Common Sense"?

Lemme elaborate...
To sum up your "common sense" section, an application/algorithm CANNOT afford to ignore out of memory situations and should do sufficient error checking. If I missed something that u wanted to say here, heLu...

So, my point is, when u're writing something you end up doing both math and common sense alva? You make a rough estimate that these are gonna be my memory requirements, based on the data structures u choose (keeping in mind the algorithm complexity, an excellent point that u made)...And then u go about coding in a way that doesn't break the application, something like

ptr = calloc
if ( ptr == NULL )
handle gracefully

Am I making sense?