Creating a memory leak with Java
So, a question: is it better or worse that the usage of GCs has changed the mindset of developers to stop worrying about allocation/freeing of resources ?<p>Given that developers still need to worry about freeing/releasing native resources, I think it might have inadvertently created a false sense of security and, in the process, resulted in developers that don't even possess this type of thinking anymore.  We ran into this with the .NET Data Provider for one of our database engines.  A good portion of .NET developers that used it were surprised to find out that they needed to call the Dispose method on certain database objects in order to free/release their native handles/resources.  This was followed by a period of confusion about what to dispose of, and what not to dispose of (like this: <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2024021/does-the-dispose-method-do-anything-at-all" rel="nofollow">http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2024021/does-the-dispose-...</a>).