The ground is shifting underneath every industry that was built on the assumption that the US would protect and preserve the globalised status quo. The software industry has shifted its entire value proposition from “we make tools that help you make or save money” to using political clout and the dollar hegemony to capture, control, and loot entire sectors of the various economies of the world. That strategy only works when you’re in charge.

It’s impossible to guess what exactly will happen next to software or tech. All I know is pretty much all of modern software is built on a premise that no longer holds. Even free and open source software is contingent on everybody agreeing to similar policies regarding copyright. Whether tech has enough clout on its own to continue its strategy of capture and control, whether it compromises with local governments to retain its power, whether we’re in for a period of collapse and fragmentation is anybody’s guess. The old world is dying and the new cannot be born.

Garbage collection can be freeing. It lets us focus on application logic rather than memory management. However, garbage collection is not magic. Understanding how it works, and how it can be tricked into maintaining memory long after it should have been released, results in faster and more reliable applications. In this article, learn about a systematic approach for locating memory leaks in JavaScript applications, several common leaking patterns, and appropriate methods to address those leaks.