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Wow, glibc now

keep[s] older versions around and adopt[s] an exponential resizing policy. This results in an amortized constant space leak per active environment variable, but there already is such a leak for the variable itself (and that is even length-dependent, and includes no-longer used values).

There have got to be pathalogical uses out there where this will cause unbounded memory growth in well-formed (according to the API) programs, no?

Interesting to see this _introduce_ a ‘bug’ (unbounded memory growth) for these programs that follow the API in order to ‘fix’ programs that don’t (by using the API in multiple threads). Pragmatism over dogma I guess. Leaves me feeling a bit sketched out though.



FWIW you can make a singly linked list with infinite number of nodes too. Memory leaks happen in well formed programs just fine, glibc is just one of many examples.




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