Ruminations on REAL Studio 2010 Release 3.2
REAL Studio released a point update to REALStudio this week and brought it up to version 3.2. The only bug fix listed is a Windows-only memory leak that affected various controls.
I know that the leak affects the StaticText control and the timer. The bug is simple to reproduce: add a StaticText control and a timer to the window and change the text in the timer.action event. Run it. That’s it.
The memory leak memory was so bad that one of my Windows apps was gobbling up tons of RAM to the point where the app was unusable. Though, to be honest, part of the huge memory leak I was experiencing was the fault of my networking code, but the StaticText and timer leaks weren’t helping matters any.
The bug was big and whether it was my ranting or enough customers complaining about it, RS fixed the leak and issued a 3.2 beta. Which I tested and the same day logged another memory leak. The original leaks were fixed but now just by putting window.refresh in the timer event caused a leak in the StaticText control. I actually logged it improperly because I wasn’t sure where the leak was and speculated on several different possibilities. The RS engineer in charge of it added a simpler example project into the Feedback report the same afternoon. So, obviously, they knew about the issue.
And yet, Release 3.2 went out the door with that known memory leak in place.
I’m not sure how I feel about it. I spent an awful lot of my own time (because I sure as hell can’t charge the client doing all this testing to fix a problem that’s not theirs). I provided timely feedback (less than 12 hours from the beta release) to test and document the bug and it was released anyway.
R3.2 is better, but it still has a major hole in it that may or may not be acceptable for my Windows builds. I’m very disappointed that R3.2 saw the light of day since it obviously wasn’t really fixed. In many ways I feel like this was a “Let’s shut Bob up and give him a new build.” I know that’s not the case or at least I hope not (not to mention that sounds sort of narcissistic).
I really am starting to question their commitment to the Windows environment given their current workload. Cocoa is late but is getting closer to reality all the time. The new Web Edition is generating lots of buzz and even though the Cocoa and Web Edition teams don’t overlap much, the keyword is ‘much’ so it means there is *some* distraction.
It’s been another miserable week of 12 hours days trying to debug my app AND Studio at the same time. So, yeah, it’s not been a pleasant one.
