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I've coded the firmware for a CAN-based communication bus for a medical device with lots of different boards talking to each other. This same company had a war industry department and they used this code in a missile project. It left a weird taste in my mouth.

Btw, they got an early version that had a memory leak, and when I went to warn them, they just said: "It's okay! It's just going to run for about 20 seconds!"



The ultimate garbage collection.


A missile needing to dynamically allocate memory is already a ridiculous idea.


There was computer vision stuff in the missile's head (for target tracking), which is where the code was used.


That is a good reason to need a non trivial amount of memory, but I don't think it means there needs to be dynamically allocated memory. That basically implies that there is something unknown ahead of time, but specs, limitations, resolution fps, etc. should all be static.


I think it was a slab allocator made in house. It was a long time ago.


Did you post about this previously? I feel like I've read that part with the memory leak before.


I favorited this post some time ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14233542

The Google Groups page is currently in a redirect loop, but if that gets sorted out, you may find the story that you're remembering.



Can't remember, so if I did, it was a long time ago. This story happened around 2010.




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