While they do not leak memory like crazy, they hog a lot and people accept it.
They do not leak memory at all. Using a lot of memory is not the same as leaking memory. And from a practical perspective, it doesn’t really matter if a calculator app on iOS uses a gigabyte or three of RAM, as the amount of multi-tasking a user can do on a phone is severely limited, and the operating system kills background apps when it needs to reclaim memory for the foreground.
The bigger problem are many “smol” programs are written without performance in mind at all
Do you have specific examples of this? The iOS calculator sucks, but it does not have performance problems. People who think every piece of software needs to be hyper-optimized are either unemployed (or should be) as they don’t get any work done, or they just don’t practice what they preach. IME, it’s usually beginners/novices who discovered what a “native” language is, like C++ or Rust, and are going through a phase. None of those people know how to actually optimize a program, haven’t even heard of Compiler Explorer, think “MESI” is a soccer player, and probably know more about TUI frameworks than profiling ones.
Did you just ask ChatGPT to give you a list of articles with the word “leak” in them? I haven’t gone through all of them, but I see two of them are Windows zombie process bugs, one is an Intel branch predictor attack, one is the example in the OP (which you posted…)
I don’t use ChatGPT. I found that list in a one-minute search on Hacker News, and the only point my comment adresses is the factually wrong statement that memory leaks are not a problem.
They do not leak memory at all. Using a lot of memory is not the same as leaking memory. And from a practical perspective, it doesn’t really matter if a calculator app on iOS uses a gigabyte or three of RAM, as the amount of multi-tasking a user can do on a phone is severely limited, and the operating system kills background apps when it needs to reclaim memory for the foreground.
Do you have specific examples of this? The iOS calculator sucks, but it does not have performance problems. People who think every piece of software needs to be hyper-optimized are either unemployed (or should be) as they don’t get any work done, or they just don’t practice what they preach. IME, it’s usually beginners/novices who discovered what a “native” language is, like C++ or Rust, and are going through a phase. None of those people know how to actually optimize a program, haven’t even heard of Compiler Explorer, think “MESI” is a soccer player, and probably know more about TUI frameworks than profiling ones.
Here some examples of memory leaks:
https://xcancel.com/neogoose_btw/status/1968757466570621251
https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2025/10/09/finding-a-vs-code-memory-leak/
https://yngve.vivaldi.net/amd-you-infected-my-pc-with-zombies/
https://github.com/dotnet/wpf/issues/7704
https://cyberinsider.com/new-intel-cpu-flaw-bypasses-spectre-v2-defenses-to-leak-kernel-memory/
https://github.com/grpc/grpc-node/issues/2893
Did you just ask ChatGPT to give you a list of articles with the word “leak” in them? I haven’t gone through all of them, but I see two of them are Windows zombie process bugs, one is an Intel branch predictor attack, one is the example in the OP (which you posted…)
I don’t use ChatGPT. I found that list in a one-minute search on Hacker News, and the only point my comment adresses is the factually wrong statement that memory leaks are not a problem.