stack smashing Was: Re: Scanning Formats (TIFF vs. JPEG)

Don wrote: I'm somewhat unhappy with Java. It allows junior programmers to do silly things, like allocate lots of memory and not have to worry about it just because there's a garbage collector. In real life, what happens is that they write applications with hundreds, even thousands of threads that grab resources other than just memory such as JDBC connections, or file handles and never properly release them. Then, when those crash, they jump up and down claiming it must be something wrong with the OS because their application is perfect, and the crash must be some misconfiguration. Worse yet, it's difficult for a sysadmin to prove anything unless they allow for heap dumps, so you can't pinpoint the bug in their code to show them, that no, it is indeed their bugs that caused this. Luckily, we do have one or two more senior developers who actually bother to seek out the crappy code and are honest enough to point it out. If you write stuff like that in C or assembly it isn't masked by a GC, it's very clear that something is wrong, and a lot easier to locate bugs using truss, systrace, gdb, etc. The trouble isn't so much that java allows these things, but rather that it creates too many low paid junior programmers which get hired because they're cheaper than more experienced ones. i.e. hiring two junior guys instead of one more senior guy who at least knows what he's doing.