Seems to just be a memory leak in a framework the editor is using, that seems to only affect M1. Which is mildly interesting but a bit of an anticlimax...
The framework is part of Apple’s UI stack and indicates a window system/graphics driver bug somewhere in macOS. So it’s probably more than just “an application has a bug”, but still not very interesting until we learn more.
> My point was nowhere nearly as interesting as if a specially crafted gif somehow triggered a memory leak in a driver when rendered.
There's absolutely no mention of "specially crafted" GIF or "when rendered" in the title. You're projecting your expectations which have nothing to do with the story and are not even hinted at by the title, and choose to be offended that they get betrayed. There are many things I'd like to retort here, but the most important is that it's against the HN guidelines, so it would be good if you stopped.
The default thought if someone says they opened a gif isn't "they splayed open the hundreds of frames for individual manipulation" anymore than someone saying "Car moved from point A to point B" would mean "Car disassembled and moved piece by piece from point A to point B"
And I don't recall the rule asking you to backseat mod :) Nothing against the rules in explaining simple nuances of written word
I wish I was a mod! I could easily check just how many downvotes this whole thread gave you. Now the only thing I can do is to soothe my eyes by looking at all the wonderful shades of grey here.
Where do you see anything about individually opening 730 frames, and why would it be unsurprising for that tiny load to cause a bug? Have you heard of video editors? The same machine can edit four 4K@60fps streams.
Thanks for making my point, the program is indeed opening individual frames.
And what are you on about after that? No one said it's unsurprising for that to cause a bug. It's saying that the gif is not cause here, an editor is coming across a framework call that's blowing up
Call it an editor bug, or a framework bug, it's not an image using the memory, it's the editor
Oh my god. I get it. You’re reading the headline as “this GIF uses xx memory”. That’s not what is says. It’s “GIF uses X memory on x86, X*10 memory on M1”. You’re picking a fight based on your own misreading.
730 frames of a 400x240 pixel image at 8 bits per pixel (which is all GIF allows) is 70MB (plus 768 bytes for the palette). We should be able to load each frame of the GIF many, many times before we reach even 1GB of RAM, let alone 35GB.
The x86 version of the same editor can open this GIF in the same way with reasonable memory consumption. This is clearly an issue with either the image editor, or as seems to be the case (based on investigation in the Twitter thread) an issue with a macOS system framework the editor uses.
Not sure why you feel the need to be so belligerent on this. All the information we need to identify this as a problem specific to the M1 version of macOS is in the first tweet, with more details that give us exact numbers in a follow-up.
Uh-oh, this is sooo important, some title on the Internet is wrong!
If I read it correctly, the same app, compiled from the same code, for the same OS, but different CPU architectures, exhibits wildly different memory consumption for the same task. That's what's interesting here, at least to me, but you chose to nitpick on the title instead, just because - from what you write - it offended you somehow by not including the word "editing" at the beginning.
I mean, sure, go on, have fun, but at least don't expect your posts not be downvoted.
If you're actually following it proves exactly what I'm saying, the gif has nothing to do with it, Firefox isn't blowing up opening that gif, it's hitting whatever framework leak exists.
This is like saying "DOCX bluescreens Windows" (which implies something that could possibly be exploited in some pretty scary ways) when in reality Word just happens to make some syscall that bluescreens Windows no matter who calls it
I don’t know why you made up your mind on this without having any details.
The person reporting is the author of a graphics editor, he damn well knows the difference between a bug in his own editor and system frameworks. The issue seems to be with opening the GIF via default system frameworks, not anything special the editor is doing. Chances are it will affect any other programs using the same frameworks, maybe even GIF viewers.
"DOCX bluescreens Windows" is exactly how your hypothetical scenario would be described.
"Bush hid the facts" is described as a Notepad bug, even though it's a bug in a specific WinAPI function used by Notepad and thus would also affect other programs that used that function. It was discovered on Notepad, it became popular as a bug of Notepad, and so it's considered a Notepad bug.
It'd be kind of crazy if there was something inherent to the TXT that when opened in any program made that bug occur! But the issue was with Notepad! Much more believable!
Windows bug would be acceptable too, or WinAPI bug :)
This isn't that complicated, I don't mind teaching y'all how to not write non-clickbait headlines
