Just because a language has garbage collection doesn't mean you still
can't leak memory—you can easily leak memory, since quite a few modern
langauges that have garbage collection have ways of calling into libraries
written in C, and those can leak.
With that said, reading “Tracking
down a memory leak in Ruby's EventMachine (link via Hacker News) was
quite informative. Looking for patterns in the leaked memory as a means of
tracking down what was being leaked was brilliant (“Well, as mentioned,
95+% of our program’s memory footprint is leaked objects. So if we just take
a random sample of bits of memory, we will find leaked objects with very
good probability.”). And I did not know you could call C functions from
within gdb.
This is something I'll have to keep in mind for work.
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