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Technology Stocks : IFMX - Investment Discussion -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Howard Armstrong who wrote (10078)	3/27/1998 4:41:00 PM
From: Mark Finger	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14631

Howard, I explained what "memory leaks" are. I did not talk about how much time IFMX engineers spend eradicating them. Personally, I spent a lot of time chasing any possible leaks, including any that might be caused by errors. When I worked in Lenexa, we used a variety of tools to eradicate bugs (and we considered any unexplained memory leak to be a bug). We used code coverage tools to ensure that all code was exercised. We use products like "Purify" to ensure that memory was properly released as well as to catch other "pointer" related problems. Numerous unit tests were designed to test each feature under "normal" and "abnormal" (either "user error" or stress testing) conditions, and these tests were run using the testing tools above. I mentioned "unexplained memory leaks" above. In a number of cases, there were libraries that we had to use that had memory leak problems. For example, I considered the X-windows libraries (for Motif) to be the worst case of memory leaks available. We saw numerous leaks that occurred in the X-windows code (we could adjust settings on Purify to isolate the offending functions). Windows 3.x also had a number of problems in this area. The key to understand here is that carefully written code can avoid such problems. The key is that the developer must examine both normal and error conditions and then exercise reasonable caution, combined with plenty of testing. Larry Ellison is full of hot air, and simply will repeat statements that he knows to be wrong. You will notice that his object solution is nowhere in sight. I have yet to see a release date for 8.1, which is the version that is supposed to allow non-Oracle objects to be created. I suspect that it may begin sliding as badly as the 8.0 release date (that slipped 4 years from their initial announcement). Larry really has some basis for talking!!!!!!!!!!!!!