Re: NSZoneMalloc() vs. objc_malloc() vs. malloc() ...

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On Monday, May 13, 2002, at 03:23 PM, Kai Henningsen wrote:

> I just tried to supply my own memory management routines via the
> _objc_malloc etc. hooks. The program promptly died.
>
> On investigation, it seems that GNUstep is mixing all three
> allocation systems from the subject, allocating stuff via one variant
> and freeing it via another (the one that just bit me is
> NSFileManager, allocating via custom_strdup via NSZoneMalloc() [and
> shouldn't that have been NSZoneMallocAtomic()?] and freeing via
> gsedRelease via free().)
>
> Fixing this seems a fairly mechanical task - *except* one would first
> need a clear direction on what should actually be used. (I'm assuming
> here that we *don't* want to use different allocation routines in
> different parts of the library, except when implementing same.)
>
> Comments?

I think all malloc/free type operations using GNUstep code should go
through the NSZone... system.  The NSFileManager call to free() is
plainly a bug.

Within the base library, some internals might need to work differently
for instance, allocation of a mutex and other operations working with the
data structures of the objc runtime should use objc_malloc()

When dealing with memory passed to/from system calls and C library 
functions,
we should be using malloc/free if those system calls are going to use
malloc/free.