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This application was *ancient*, probably older than a lot of you reading this post. It was written in Visual Basic (pre-.NET), but the new OS images didn't have the VB runtime anymore, so machines could no longer bootstrap

We needed to rewrite the VB app into something that didn't have any installation dependencies, so they decided to rewrite this in C++ But instead of rewriting it (look at the code, determine what it does, write a new app), they decided to *line-for-line port* the VB6 code to C++

This is, objectively speaking, a doomed endeavor. This app had to run for weeks at a time. VB has a garbage collector, and C++ does not, so a single memory leak here will eventually brick a lab machine and require human intervention