Seriously, I recall one threading bug that tended to hit about 1 out of 100 of an app's users, and the users affected would only see it maybe once every two weeks or so. The timing window for the crash to occur was probably less than a milisecond, and the crash would only happen on mulit-processor machines. When Joar Wingfors sent me a test case that would reliably hit the crasher within a few minutes, we were able to finally close a bug that we'd had for years in OS X.
GC wouldn't have solved that particular problem (it was a locking issue), but memory management bugs in multi-threaded code have cost a lot of developers a lot of time and money over the years.
by John C. Randolph — Jan 03
Seriously, I recall one threading bug that tended to hit about 1 out of 100 of an app's users, and the users affected would only see it maybe once every two weeks or so. The timing window for the crash to occur was probably less than a milisecond, and the crash would only happen on mulit-processor machines. When Joar Wingfors sent me a test case that would reliably hit the crasher within a few minutes, we were able to finally close a bug that we'd had for years in OS X.
GC wouldn't have solved that particular problem (it was a locking issue), but memory management bugs in multi-threaded code have cost a lot of developers a lot of time and money over the years.
-jcr