Article at http://www.onlamp.com/lpt/a/6557
(excerpt) Federico Biancuzzi: I remember that just before releasing 3.8 you had to disable the new behavior of your implementation of malloc()/free() that returned SIGSEGV when accessing a freed area. You had to do this because too many ports were instable (crashing). Does 3.9 enable it by default? Otto Moerbeek: I first have to make a correction: we do unmap unused memory, but not very aggressively. There are too many programs containing "use-after-free" bugs that would stop working if we unmapped unused memory all the time. I remember one of my grad school CS professors mentioning in class one day years ago that The collected algorithms of the ACM (CACM) contained algorithms that would retrieve data from the free area of a stack after the data had been popped from the stack. I remember also being stunned when I heard that. Dave Feustel -- Lose, v., experience a loss, get rid of, "lose the weight" Loose, adj., not tight, let go, free, "loose clothing"
