Primoz is a long time Delphi developer as well as writer for The Delphi Magazine, Monitor and Blaise Pascal magazines. You may know him from his blog TheDelphiGeek.com or his OmniThreadLibrary for threading in Delphi. You can also find his articles at 17th Elephant and he is on Stack Overflow.
- We discuss Delphi Mac support
- Delphi Garbage Collection
- 64-Bit Delphi
- The OmniThreadLibrary
- and more!
11 replies on “41 – Primoz Gabrijelcic – OmniThreadLibrary”
Calling them “memory leaks or whatever you want to call them” is really awkward and needlessly confuses the issue. I think we’ve got a bad definition of memory leaks. Theoretically, a memory leak is memory that can no longer be reached by the program, and a good garbage collector does (if it works) make this impossible. But in practice, that’s not a memory leak, that’s *one cause of* a memory leak.
Here’s a better practical definition that eliminates a lot of awkwardness in discussion: A memory leak is when your program continues to hold on to memory after it is no longer needed. This can be caused by untraceable references, or by continuing to hold a reference to something that you no longer need, or probably be a few other things as well.
The end result is the same: your program’s memory footprint goes up unnecessarily, leaving less RAM available for other programs on the system, and making your program more likely to need to hit the swapfile, slowing it down.
It’s Blaise not Blasie and your pronunciation was way out. The guy’s name was Blaise Pascal and you really ought to get on top of that if you are purporting to be a Delphi expert!!
Thanks for the podcast though.
@Mason: I do agree with your definition. Now we only have to re-record the interview 🙂
In my defense – it’s sometimes hard for me to quickly formulate my answers in English and then I get slightly lost.
@David: I fixed the spelling, and I never claimed to be a Delphi Expert, but glad you think so. I knew the pronunciation was off, but it was after 2 AM and I was having a hard time convincing my mouth to say it right. Thanks for the catch though.
@Mason: I agree those are memory leaks, but I also know that I have been in many heated debates with individuals who claim they are not, so acknowledging that some people would not call them a memory leak is fair.
@Gabr: I’ll take this episode down and we can try to record it again. It will give me more time to work on my pronunciation.
@Jim
Why take it down? There’s lots of good stuff there. Pronunciation doesn’t matter. Well, it’s good to try to get it right but really, it doesn’t distract from what you’ve done here.
@David: The take it down comment was mostly sarcastic for @Gabr’s benefit since we had tried so many times to record this podcast.
@Jim
Mea culpa! And to think that as a Brit, and a sarcastic one at that, I really ought to be able to detect a bit of irony when I see it. Oh well, back to the drawing board for me!
@Jim: Congratulations for a very good (let’s say B to B+) spelling of my complicated name 🙂
BTW, the GC book we are talking about is described in short here (along with the link to the Amazon): http://www.thedelphigeek.com/2010/03/books-garbage-collection.html.
@gabr: “Sorry, the page you were looking for in the blog The Delphi Geek does not exist.” (the amazon one) Without a dot at the end it works: http://www.thedelphigeek.com/2010/03/books-garbage-collection.html
Thanks @Jeroen, I fixed @gabr’s link too.