Application Memory Leaks?

[wrldwzrd89]

If a Mac OS X application (command-line OR GUI) crashes, and therefore doesn't free any memory it may have allocated, does Mac OS X return such memory back to the free memory pool (because, for example, such allocations are part of the application's memory size), or is that memory lost in a state of being allocated but never freed? In Mac OS 9, an application crash would leak memory.

 

[robbieduncan]

It should get returned to the system when the process is killed by the kernel. Memory leeks only normally occur when a process keeps running but does not free memory that it is no longer using.

 

[wrldwzrd89]

It should get returned to the system when the process is killed by the kernel. Memory leeks only normally occur when a process keeps running but does not free memory that it is no longer using.

That's encouraging. I'm glad Mac OS X is designed well enough to be immune to the kinds of problems that plagued Mac OS 9. That means that if a Classic environment application dies, taking all of Classic down with it, Mach (the Mac OS X kernel) will return all memory allocated to Classic back to the free memory pool, right? If that's true, that feature ALONE makes Classic better than a boot into Mac OS 9.