Bar joke

Pascal Cuoq - 29th Sep 2011

So I walked into a bar, and I said:

Ah! Ah! There's a new Firefox, and one item in the release notes is \Drastically improved memory handling for certain use cases". Nice phrase. We'll remember it for when we too fix a memory leak.

Someone who knew about Firefox internals and didn't hear the "Ah! Ah!" part because of all the noise (busy day at the bar) interjected:

It has nothing to do with leaks; new GC algorithms reduced fragmentation.

Well if I may dust off my middle school vocabulary for this occasion duh.

Losing memory to fragmentation is a kind of memory leak.

I am not going to complain that punk programmers who reinvent decades old technology get more credit and success they deserve just because what they do looks new. Life is too short. But I do reserve the right to mock someone who implements a garbage collector. That leaks memory because of fragmentation. For whatever new programming language. In the 2010s.

Pascal Cuoq
29th Sep 2011