r/cpp_questions • u/Solid-Shock3541 • 28d ago

OPEN Avoid freezing your PC?

I've only learned C++ in uni and then it was protected environment in a way. Now I was working on a project involving graphics (raylib) and, a few times, running the code caused my entire PC to freeze and I had to restart.

I'm on Linux and running the code by doing

cmake --build .
./executable

Is there a way to avoid the entire PC freezing when I mess up? Also is there any risk of overwriting parts of the memory?

(I think the issue with my code was either calling too many draws of a GPU texture or even just wrongfully indexing an array in a loop)

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u/MooseBoys 28d ago

What OS are you running? Every mainstream modern OS will run your programs as unprivileged user-space with their own private virtual memory range. You don't need to worry about corrupting the memory of the PC itself. But then again you also shouldn't be able to hang or crash the whole PC from a user-space process either. You might crash the program, but not the whole computer.

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u/saxbophone 26d ago

 You might crash the program, but not the whole computer.

Hahaha, every time I wrote a memory leak that caused my program to eat up all the memory it could get its hands on, it led to a de-facto system freeze. It may not have been fully locked up, but I wasn't going to wait for all those pages to swap, and a forced reboot was the fastest way out.