[wbhart]

Missiles don't always hit their intended target. They can go off course, potentially be hacked, fall into the wrong hands, be sold to mass murderers, fail to explode, accidentally fall out of planes (even nuclear bombs have historically done this), miss their targets, encounter countermeasures, etc.

Nobody is claiming that this was done for reasons of good software design. It's perfectly reasonable to suspect it was done for reasons of cost or plain negligence.

There's a reason tech workers protest involvement of their firms with the military. It's because all too often arms are not used as a deterrent or as a means of absolute last resort, but because they are used due to faulty intelligence, public or political pressure, as a means of aggression, without regard to collateral damage or otherwise in a careless way.

The whole point here is the blase way the technician responded, "of course it leaks". The justification given is not that it was necessary for the design, but that it doesn't matter because it's going to explode at the end of its journey!

[willvarfar]

A simple bump allocator with no reclaim is fairly common in embedded code.

Garbage collection makes the performance of the code much less deterministic.

A lot of embedded loops running on embedded in-order cpus without an operating system use cycle count as a timing mechanism etc.

[wbhart]

Right, but that isn't the argument that was being used here, which is my point. The way I read it, the contractor cared only enough to get the design over the line so the customer would sign off on it. Their argument was that you shouldn't care about leaks due to scheduled deconstruction, not because of a technical consideration.

There exist options between no reclaim and using a garbage collector which could be considered, depending on the exact technical specifications of the hardware it was running on and the era in which it happened.

But retrofitting technical reasoning about why this may have been done is superfluous. The contractor already said why they did it, and the subtext of the original post is that it was flippant and hilarious.

[ncmncm]

Fetishism is not compatible with sound engineering.

"Cared only enough" is just your projection. The contractor knew the requirements, and satified the requirements with no waste of engineering time, and no risk of memory reclamation interfering with correct operation. The person complaining about leaks wasted both his time and the contractor's.

[Dylan16807]

You had a good comment going until the last sentence.

When your job is performing an analysis of the code, five minutes asking for a dangerous feature to be justified is ridiculously far from a "waste of time".