[geophile]

The problem, of course, is that the chief software engineer doesn't appear to be have any understanding of what is causing the leaks, and whether the safety margin is adequate. Maybe there is some obscure and untested code path in which leaking would be much faster than anticipated.

To be sure, it is a unique environment, in which you know for a fact that your software does not need to run beyond a certain point in time. And in a situation like that, I think it is OK to say that we have enough of some resource to reach that point in time. (It's sort of like admitting that climate change is real, and will end life on earth, but then counting on The Rapture to excuse not caring.) But that's not what's going on here. It sounds like they weren't really sure that there would definitely be enough memory.

[willvarfar]

You are reading a lot into a short story. You don’t know that the engineer hasn’t had someone exactly calculate the memory allocations.

Static or never-reclaimed allocations are common enough in embedded code.

[clSTophEjUdRanu]

Freeing memory isn't free, it takes time. Maybe it's not worth the time hit and they know exactly where it is leaking memory.

[blattimwind]

Actually the story implies the opposite

> they had calculated the amount of memory the application would leak in the total possible flight time for the missile and then doubled that number.