Eli5 why does a program/app “hang up” and fail to load, but trying again makes it happen?
In: Technology
No 5 year old could understood that easily, but here i go…
Sometimes when a code is running a lot of stuff can go wrong. Errors are common and even expected in every program, but the developers will not usually “catch” and deal with them all, since everything could happen. Most of code is usually made with a certain expectation in mind but sometimes some rare thing happens to mess with the programs “plan”. The important thing is that when a program runs, two things are going on where error is prone to appear. First, you got the executable code, which is always the same. This executable is the stuff you download and install in your computer. So, when you start this executable, it will load some data from your computer storage to your computer’s memory. The data in memory will change according to your input, what you click, what you type, etc. The data in memory is not saved sometimes, kinda like when we used to play games without a memory card in the PS2. Sometimes, there can be an error on this memory, and the whole process will be compromised because it will not be able to comprehend the data and parse it, although it may try, and from them we can have all sorts of errors. Some viruses use this unpredictability to make the process go so wrong it does something it is not supposed to. I this case, restarting the app will force the process to generate all of the memory data again. Also, if the memory data gets saved in your storage to be loaded in the future, some errors may persist. Some apps are smart enough to delete corrupted data from storage once they’ve detected an error, but others will require a full reinstall, following the same logic.
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