[MUD-Dev] Re: TECH: reliablity (was: Distributed Muds)

[Derek Snider]

>From Bruce (bruce at puremagic.com), April 27, 2001 12:48 AM
> Derek Snider wrote:

>> As I said... better to have enough RAM than to rely on virtual
>> memory.  Also... your program should check the return status of
>> malloc().  If malloc fails, then something bad is going on, and it
>> should fail gracefully... not coredump.
 
> Or, you could follow sound, basic software engineering principles
> and work hard to ensure that these types of things didn't happen.
> Memory and resource management, as well as correct execution, aren't
> things that can or should be entrusted to luck, especially within a
> long running server process.  Crashes or system crippling bugs
> simply aren't acceptable. (And there's nothing like that sinking
> feeling in your gut while you watch the server crash and write out a
> big core file. :()

Are you seriously trying to tell me that memory leaks, memory
corruption, and crashes _never_ happen when you "follow sound, basic
software engineering priciples"?

Whatever programming utopia you exist in is far, far, far away from
the world of commercial game development... or any competitive
commercial development.

The larger and more complex a program gets, the more likely something
is to go wrong, and the harder it is to track it down.

I've used Purify and Insure, and many other memory debuggers, and they
usally choke on large complex programs that make heavy use of memory.

The only way to have a bug-free program is to write it bug-free in the
first place.

Unfortunately this is nearly impossible with high-pressure deadlines.

Microsoft spends untold millions of dollars on development and cannot
make programs that don't crash.

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