[jldugger]

This depends entirely on the mode of operation which I suspect neither of us know in great detail; if in any circumstance the runtime of the program is not tied to expenditure of fuel you have literal ticking time bomb.

Ideally we'd be able to tie such assertions into a unified static analysis tool, rather than having humans evaluate conflicting analyses. And god forbid the hardware parameters ever change, because now you need to re-evaluate every such decision, even the ones nobody documented. Case in point: Arianne 5 (not exactly my original scenario, but exactly this one -- 64bit -> 16 bit overflow caused a variety of downstream effects ending in mission failure).

[mannykannot]

Well, yes, I already explained that it depended on circumstances, and just let me add that I would bet the engineer quoted in the article (explaining that the memory leaks were a non-issue) knew much more about the specifics than either of us.

The Ariane 5 issue is not, of course, a memory leak or other rescource-release-and-reuse issue. It is a cautionary tale about assumptions (such as the article's authors assumption that memory leaks are always bad.)