It seems like I don’t have anything to do with C++ because I have not touched C++ much in this blog. I am a software engineer by trade; programming and debugging is a large part of what I do during the day. I was a little frustrated last two days by a memory problem shown only on UNIX. The program ran fine on Windows, except one or two instances slightly weird results which I tend to ignore. But I could not pass the UNIX test and obviously something is wrong. By looking at the trace back I can tell it’s a memory problem. Memory problem is kind of problem everyone hates. Because it’s usually hard to find the root cause. Dev Partner made the process a little easier because it will show all potential memory overrun and leaks. To my surprise, I made a mistake like the following (very basic C++ mistakes):
char *temp_str = new char[length];
for(int ii = 0; ii < length*2; ii++){ // do something with temp_str[ii] } It is a typical memory overrun problem because I only allocate "length" number of char, but I was trying to use "length*2" number of char. It's like use twice the credit limit? But I am still very puzzlled that my program ran on Windows (without Dev Parter) before the fix. No wonder we see "Windows crash" from time to time 🙂 Seriously, in software development we want the problems being uncovered the earlier, the better. Because we don't want our customer run our program and crash.