How relational aspects could have helped Princeton win the DARPA challenge

Eric | November 18, 2007

image Bryan Cattle recently explained why their autonomous car developed for the DARPA urban challenge did not make it: They simply had a memory leak in their C# code, filling up their entire heap space after about 28 minutes which made the computer crash. It’s important to note that this is not at all any flaw in C#. As C# is now, it was the programmers’ fault: In their code they kept around a list of obstacles which the car passed by. Obstacles that came out of sight were deleted… but not quite. Because the obstacles were registered as event listeners somewhere else in the code they were reachable and hence could not be garbage collected. Too bad, but how could such a problem have been avoided?

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Research
Tags
Bug finding, Coding, DARPA challenge, Java