Re: GNUstep and valgrind

[amon]

I've been continuing my slog up the learning curve of valgrind
and the like. I've also found the tool I wrote to be quite useful.

At this point I am seeing one key issue behind much of my
storage issues. It's the autorelease pool. I'm in an environment
where pretty much anything that goes into it might as well be
a leak, because there is never a release. Systems are intended
to run for days, months, years and that means I've got all sorts
of crud vanishing into the pool that I have no control over.

In many cases there seems to be no choice but to use the methods
that return autoreleased storage because there is no instance
method varient of them. This is particularly the case in NSString
where all the useful string initializers are Class methods only.
So I'm between a rock and a hard place there.

And please, if you haven't been in this discussion with me
before, note that I am working on embedded real time systems.
There is no GUI. There is no event loop where everything can
be released each iteration. It just sits there and does what
it has been commanded to do and listens over links to parent
and child hosts/processes forever. I have to control the
allocations pretty much manually with retain's and releases.

I can think of some hacks though... what if there were a pool
drain method that did not decrement the retain count unless
it was one already? Or if there were a method that let you
remove an object from the pool? Seems like it would be at least
possible to subclass NSAutoreleasePool and add such behavior.
After all, that's why the CS Gods gave us OO!

--
+---------------------------------------------------------------+
|   Dale Amon                  Immortal Data                    |
|   CEO             Midland International Air and Space Port    |
| amon@vnl.com       "Data Systems for Deep Space and Time"     |
+---------------------------------------------------------------+